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Sometimes I wander around wondering
where my mother is. The family buried
her next to her own mother. Out there,
the hard pines darken early. Anyone
can hide and not be found for years.
Bobby Cherry laid low there. The girls came
in his dreams...

They were the eighth plague visited upon Egypt: When Pharaoh refused to free the people of Israel, Exodus tells us, Moses stretched out his staff and a wind rose from the east, blowing hard for one day until a vast swarm of locusts arrived...

hovering their mouths 

like two men 

moments before 

they turn on each other

that is how the grass smells 

In a nondescript hotel in East Texas, I fell
in love with a couple. There in the dim

hallway with rugs that were clean enough
but darkly patterned to hide the stains so who knows,

her back was against the wall, her arms up and around
his neck...

For almost a century, Amish and Mennonite families have been vacationing on Florida’s Gulf Coast.

Trichotillomania and the Unconscious Desire to Pull

My mother is alive and funny
in the house above the marsh.

I think she does not miss my father much
as he is still alive, though elsewhere.

The coast near Sea Ranch, a community in Sonoma County, California, has a kind of primordial majesty to it: a verdant shoreline where cliffs high and low drop into a rushing surf.

When it began, I do not know. If I kept a journal or a diary, as some of you do, perhaps then I would know. But I don’t, and so I don’t. When the cold began to pursue me.