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Your six kids search for you all over Yakima. We don't find you in the corner bar, the lights low, your spirits high, sipping one last brandy. We don't find you sitting on a bench, shoulders stooped, waiting for the last bus home. We find you miles from town, lost, gazing at spring apple trees…

Because, of breasts with their nipples, of eggs so warm beneath their hen they seem to pulse, to throb, to give birth to themselves the way when your mouth has been on my nipple so long I begin to dissolve, begin to travel through your body, all larger longer than my own and lodge there,…

Her hand waves to dispel illusions. Insensitive to photons of light she doesn't stir for the clink of skeletons diving through. . . This one, the special one, proved the existence of sublimation aging on the sea-rocks, and there is no glimmer, no star-flash comparable to his lips, his intangible touch.

The first has a town for a setting, with a tower and a street with trees, and in their shade farmers' wives selling the fruit of their labors and the handiwork of their daughters. The men are sitting under the trellis of the Cheval Blanc or in the Café du Soleil and the talk is…

for Carolyn Matsumoto, 1959-1984 Everybody has some and everybody knows Dorothy has beautiful feet and does it matter ot anybody other than of course the ballet master who told her this is the foot I have been waiting for. Took it in his hands. Let it rest there on his thigh while he held her…

I first danced there on the warm linoleuin of our kitchen in my father's arms. Our hands clasped, feet scraping across the floor. I felt so comfortable with this, my first dance— as he led, and the music played on. The needle scraped in the final groove. I felt his grip release, our blood flow…

His wife folds her death bed—the waft of the sheets flutters through her lips. His name shifts on her face light as sun. Her snow-white mind is winter. This winter he gave himself absence. In the half- empty bed he knows his body. He whispers, “Life of the past.” He takes her to the north…

1 I know all that's wrong with coveting your neighbor's life, but I want the one I've invented for this couple in front of me in line at the license bureau. I can see the pulse in his temple, the faint down along her jaw. But I can't understand their constant murmurings, so practiced they…