“I light one, and toss it under the slide.”

“A nudity that isn’t an apostolic pendulum/swinging between pleasure and sin.”

“At breakfast, Henry thought he should discuss fatherly matters, but didn’t know which or how.”

“I find him a collectable specimen / for my ongoing study / of longing.”

“Now, sat in the café, I forgot the general rundown feeling that had nagged at me all morning, and I wanted to stay; happy and nostalgic, with Marcus.”

“The caretaker sees the world through its wishes; he feels the passage of time this way, he hears the people’s pain, he smells the glacial pace of change.”

“This is where Oppenheimer lived / before he ended the war, / where he read the Bhagavad Gita”

“this morning is milk / with a thick mist / of souplight”

“the Boots perfume counter assistant looking / like Dracula’s daughter”

“You have to admit that in this way, the Higgs has sort of a sheen of godliness.”

“Among the many words they didn’t use was judōteki-kōgeki—literally, passive-aggressive—which had recently infiltrated the Japanese language via Western theories of psychotherapy. But did Japan need such a word? Maybe that’s just the way people are. Especially as relationships wear on.”

“Imagine Mother, a silhouette in lavender.”

“If I lend you a letter w, you must return that same letter w, the oman in the bookshop said.”

“He may as well have fucked me into the mattress, he was so possessed with it.” 

“The one thing she never felt while she was dreaming, she thought, was suspicion that she was in a dream.”

“Octavian sat there with winter in his eyes, calculating, controlling the narrative.”

“Hibbs had the thing grabbed by the dewlaps and its nose forced skyward.”