Against melancholy, against regret, common sense and cynicism can do nothing. She regrets not what was, but what should have been, could have been, had she only made some other choice way back then.

Uncle Max made an ambiguous face and told me, not for the first time, that black men used to be kings. Then he shifted his Good Humor bar to his left hand, and slapped me. Sometimes I still feel the pop of his ring on my mouth.

It bothered him she didn’t try to hide it. He would have tried to hide something like this. When he thought this, he understood that his wife was a better person than he was and this bothered him too.

It all happened so fast; it hardly seemed real until the war began and it was too real and then the war ended and nothing had been saved, which was always the case when foolish men made prideful decisions.

What does it mean to recognize a person? To know a person? To understand and tell what has happened?

My humble roof! Smoke from a beggar’s fire! / So different from what I was born into!

I want to give you everything. / This is called a sickness.

1 / You can’t prove it but / 2 / this is reality.

I stood a while / before the flowers

A thin glaze left on her palm from a thing held too long / or is it her own thingness / that rose from her hand to meet the bowl or apple or face in a dream, or is it / only memory / leaking from her / almost too slowly to notice.

One moth flies above many hands / & I don’t want the words for desire / to fuse to a life of what presents a weed

Never has an empty hand been made / into more of a fist, and Waterfall Without / it swings so hard it swings out / of existence. How will anyone get married / now, with no wall of water behind them?

An idle wife in the home / Lying down early, getting up late

Everyone’s dead, the rest are gone. / What remains are deciduous words tasting of seaweed, / toothbrushes, hairbrushes, shoe brushes.

Suborned to bear false witness, he said to himself, If I don’t, someone else will. Whereupon he was someone else.

8 / The stars inside preside / over time, for a century

This warm spring weather made us lazy / Sitting side by side on a park bench

She has a memory of the world outside this place. There was a time when she thought she might be able to outrun whatever it was that has made her this way.

She felt the sort of panic that sometimes seized her when she stood by herself on a subway platform, alone: She had lost her baby, forgotten her on the train!

A dark fairy tale about our faces, our transience, and why we take down life and try to preserve it.

The recently dispersed with their encumbering passports. To them everything is new; everything has to be discovered and experienced and lost from scratch.