Mrs. L. was sitting on a love seat in her nightgown. She was sitting in a man’s lap....

Roanne hungered. Memory had ruled her forever. Shards really, edged like machetes: daddy, whose fingers had eyes in the dark. Momma, ensconced in the shadows. Inside the church, those pairs of short…

I assume the shape of a pronoun.

I tell myself I should have known. You were always absence.

One of the drunk men, a dear friend, hunk, as he updated me, now living the existence of a poet, called from San Francisco to say he would take the plane to Minneapolis, do it, then leave me to raise the baby.

I'm getting self-righteous here, Dear Reader . . . [hey! wait a second! this is my diary! what are you doing, looking at it, dude! Hit the road! Scram! Vamoose!]

It’s that laugh of hers that gets me...

skin cancer walks along Zuma beach at noon

After sportscasters announced the assassination and while the reverberations of the words were still fading people were already shouting

Jojo dolls & basketballs a mindflex & pick-up sticks Parcheesi and—no, not Parcheesi a supersoaker, a Care Bear

I write poems as if language matters.

white-gray mounds persist

And I don't know how long it will be until she comes outside and figures it all out. Figures me out.

Suppose Eve, strolling through the sunlit Garden, had not stumbled on that particular Tree at all, the wily serpent twined in its lower branches?

Moore doubted, perhaps, that readers could sympathize with a man who had killed someone for a cause or a girlfriend who forgave him. Perhaps she felt that maiming is (not) worse than murder. Perhaps she decided that the story should be about that.