center

Though each year's spring may be the last for us,
We take our comfort driving side by side,
And opt to greet each season without fuss
As we have done for decades, groom and bride.

Borgia showed every perversity of the Pope and his brood. There was brother-sister incest. The Pope himself had the grossest sexual desire (unrequited) for Lucrezia.

“All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.” So begins Slaughter House Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death.

Being able to spot lie after lie after lie: it’s continual, endless, like being used and craved as someone else’s drug. Every other sentence is now an insult, and the friendship has turned to ash.

The first warning is when she responds with questions in response to statements. The first time it had happened, I’d answered them patiently, even though her tone was strange—frankly it was rude and detached, with the trappings of analytics covering a core of malice.

That this desire, this guilt-sway of your hips, was put in its proper place among the centuries, the galaxies, among all those who have ever died. Strikingly alive.

the commentator’s mouth still moves,
silent now,
a mime of authority.
a mother’s scream clipped mid-syllable.

Each week falling like a plodding foot, though we’d have sworn there were more than 52 in that burgeoning deck. We tried shoring up the months, yet still they’d bleed into each other:

He shut his eyes a moment, mulling over a rational explanation in case he had to tell his brother why he had never gone to see him or called him in so many stinking years.

My act is slipping. My “professionalism,” as they call it. Honestly, that’s just it: an act. Medical schools work hard to prepare you for the great art of customer service that medicine really is.