words that sink directly into my bones

They rode in a narrow enfilade along a trail strewn with the dry round turds of goats and they rode with their faces averted from the rock wall and the bakeoven air which it rebated, the slant black shapes of the mounted men stenciled across the stone with a definition austere and implacable like shapes capable of violating their covenant with the

You are a fever I am learning to live with, and everything is happening at the wrong end of a very long tunnel.

- Richard Siken, “Straw House, Straw Dog”

... and this morning I suggest that those of us with kid brothers are immensely lucky in life, and those of us without kid brothers missed a great gentle gift unlike any other; for older brothers are stern and heroic and parental, lodestars to steer by or steer against, but kid brothers, at least in their opening chapters, are open books, eager and

The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman’s making onto a foreign land. Ye’ll wake more than the dogs.

-Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It's all

over: she'll learn some words, she'll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,

your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue
nothing. You did, you loved, your feet
are sore. It's dusk. Your daughter's tall.

- Thomas L