I’ll quit smoking
as soon as I
get lung cancer.

You can be a mother who knows a god,
And you can ask him for magic armor,
A shield the width of Saturn’s widest rings,

And, after the explosion, made spheres sing,
A pure expression of pure poetry,
Like rising rain or a nation with no

I walked in the door, took off my coat, took off my sunglasses, set them down with my keys, took off my shoes and socks, my jeans, my shirt, my bra and underwear, set them all on the chair by the door

Montaigne was right, without the body’s meddling love
is more thrilling.
Yet from the start in elementary what she did

Many children’s games depend on a physical handicap. Hopscotch, for ­example, requires a skillful player to hop from square to square on one leg while the other merely dangles in the air, as though amputated so long ago he had time to practice jumping without it.

Winter. Late January
afternoon. Night falls fast.
You think I should know this

A Chinese emperor, in order to preserve
his power, decided that he would never
grant clemency to anyone. His reign

In my case, there was no drama. The lady doctor
was very nice. I made my way quickly to the other side
of being not pregnant again. Of being without child.

The disturbed man chopped up the body
of the older woman for days and threw it
into garbage cans at various locations