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National Book Award authors

The Masquers

I am lying, you say hesitantly, tasting
the thin syllables, gauging their feathery weight
in the air: chill fine whining notes.

 

Foster Home

When we first saw Mary Miles, I will say that our hearts went out to her—you always seem to know, in the very first instant, when a person, particularly a child, is going to mean something special to you. Not that Mary Miles was a child exactly, being eleven years old.

 

Lost Creek

That shallow fast-running

  creek. White
rapids. The mud-colored
  water breaking
in anger brittle as
  bone.