Powell sat on a bench beneath a linden at Cişmigiu Park watching an old man having a sponge bath in the artificial lake. Bucharest. How clean could the water be?

Translated from the French by Matthew Brauer.

For a long time, family seemed to me to be a vast territory.

This is the first line that I ever spoke on stage. I have been working on this monologue—and preparing myself to deliver it—for a long time. The memory zone is lit up. Silence.

Most nights, the monster movie memorabilia collector reads stories to Kong and the other creatures, as though ushering them to sleep. Not that they can tell night from day in the collector’s basement; there are no windows to let in the sun’s rays.

I know how to tell you this now.

The day I went back to Philly was not a real day. It was Feb 29th, and if I’d taken my road trip one year earlier or later, the time would not have existed. This—plus the unchanging drizzle, and the giant sorrowful face of Edgar Allan Poe painted on the side of a building—gave the day its other-worldly feel.

His mother was a selkie, but he did not know that yet, not for sure. All he knew, on the day that he watched her walk into the water and sink underneath it, as if the water itself were a force that could pull her like gravity, was that she was his mother.

In her dreams Becky Mandlebraun saw swimming pools. Most recently, there was the skinny four-lane pool her childhood swim team had practiced in, and after that, like the next bead on a chain, came a dream of the roomier eight-lane pool they eventually moved into.

The recreational vehicles came over the roads and into the desert, raising dust straight down the country as the crow flies—tent campers, travel trailers, toy haulers, fifth wheels, and motor homes. The men and women at the wheels, old-timers in seersucker trousers or khaki shorts, in their mouths dentures, cavities, and rot, and in their toiletry kits a diminishing stash of off-brand meds, orange bottles with white caps issuing a desperate, near-empty rattle.

The invitation arrived in the mail:

Dear M,

You are cordially invited to a reception being held in your honor on Tuesday, October 7 at 7:00 PM. Please RSVP by the end of today.

Yours Truly,

The People You’ve Wronged

First rule of the ballpark, at least for the girls like me—we don’t sit with the fans. They crowd the bleachers behind home plate all the way up to the announcer’s box. They lean along the baseline fences, fingers tightened in the chain links.

This was the summer my mother worried about me. I was fifteen, planning a visit to Catalina Island, where my father lived. Lately, I only saw him a few times a year, and when I did, he always came to the mainland, to Long Beach; I’d never been to his new house.

In the Realm of the Five Senses what does desire attach to?

The wildness of the heart increases in the dark.

The absence of God only makes it wilder.

We lie in bed wearing bird suits. We sing.

your paperweight. This seems

wrong. Seems like a sign that I need

to spend more time on my own, so I

Tor House and Hawk Tower

on Aaron’s mother’s den floor

and the boys can’t figure how

My Dad has come to pick up his black bag that carries a small, permitted firearm. I’ve put it up high in the closet next to the two Christmas dolls I’ve already purchased for my daughter.

Searchlight greets the audience like a hot yellow hand: love and law
partners, Catholic girls in mustard uniform, their chaperones curling
Playbills to binoculars. When illumination finds a politician in your section

When I emerged, it was dusk & I learned that this too is hell,

an afterlife, the center of a lost amphitheater whose seats

are a deep moss, wet-black with yesterday’s rain. As I faced west,

the sun, obscured by the pines, shone in the gaps, pulsed

Whenever it appears to the [appropriate government] that land in any

locality is needed for any public purpose [or for a company]...

Thereupon it shall be lawful...to enter upon...any land in such locality;

to dig or bore into the sub-soil; to do all other acts necessary to

If the highest goal
is do no harm,

what a wonder we’re

Dear woman, we both have had our fill of trials.

The Odyssey, 23.394 (trans. Robert Fagles)

I only thought it, but you turned to me

Ekphrasis after photograph bearing caption “The body of Big Foot, a chief of the

Miniconjou Sioux, lies frozen in the snow that covered the bloody battlefield at
Wounded Knee on September 29, 1890”