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lights in the twilight, lights of Solvay over the expanse of frozen snow-covered      lake, orange lights of the refineries, yellow and green and red lights of the neon along the      strip, lights as if undersea, the argon just coming to exist, all lights in the cold moisture of the grounded wind staggering across the lake…

Lily’s marking stock in the back where Walter sweeps and bets and makes boxes out of cardboard. Rose at the cash dreams Cracow. She’s got numbers on her arm. Eleanor threatens to call the union if my father calls her fat once more.           She’s fat. The code for thieves is nineteen; when Pauline shouts nineteen…

We decided to have the abortion, became killers together. The period that came changed nothing. They were dead, that young couple who had been for life. As we talked of it in bed, the crash was not a surprise. We went to the window, looked at the crushed cars and the gleaming curved shears of…

The horse beneath me seemed To know what course to steer Through the horror of snow I dreamed, And so I had no fear, Nor was I chilled to death By the wind’s white shudders, thanks To the veils of his patient breath And the mist of sweat from his flanks. It seemed that all…

When the shift was over he went out and stood under the night sky a mile from the darkened baseball stadium and waited for the bus. He could taste nickel under his tongue, and when he swiped the back of his hand across his nose he caught the smell of hydrochloric acid. There were clouds…

The gendarme came to tell me you had hung yourself on the door of a rented room like an overcoat like a bathrobe hung from a hook; when they forced the door open your feet pushed against the floor. Inside your skull there was no room for us your circuits forgot me. Even in Paris…

The sky begins nearer the ground when a red shirt hangs on the line in rain, the rain invisible until wind pushes it sideways, the long diagonals striping the air, taut as if they passed through hands. Like something valuable, spoons, with their silver tongues on the porch, leap where the string pierced them; the…

Lightning cracks its red and green and violet whips, or sets its white hooks deep into our soundest sleep, and you wake. Four a.m. Towers of air, dark glaciers you imagine them, lurch together, avalanching, rumbling forward under earth and sill. Rain scours down in bushels, or pops off your windows like a spray of…

Someone came in to ask how are you only I couldn’t quite hear the words, I thought he was asking who. who are you? so I started to say my name’s Jordan, only I never got past the vowel I’m Joe just Joe call me Joe then I stopped to think maybe I really am…