And the box inside him in which his mother resides is velvet and black and without size.

The heart hacked out of the center of an overgrown hedge with an axTo live beyond the brain

Why not the Victorians and their sentimental grief-wreaths woven from a loved one's hair?

Not the bureaucrat's stamp on the folder of our fate. But a knot nonetheless, and not of our making.

It is some water lilies and a skull in a decorative pond,and a tiny goldfish swimminglike an animated change-pursemade of brightness and surprisesobserving the moment through its empty eye.

Look! I bear into this room a platter piled high with the rage my mother felt toward my father! Yes, it's diamonds now. It's pearls, public humiliation, an angry dime-store clerk, a man passed out at the train station, a girl at the bookstore determined to read every fucking magazine on this shelf for free.

The aunts gathered around the fiery cake chanting, Make a wish! Make a wish!

A man holding a woman made of bad moods in his arms.

Fragrant, dreaming, unreal, and having to do, terribly, with love.