ALT The Jeweler’s Son So I was never polished stone, never circled by worriers’ thumbs, never carved a path in ripples from one edge of a lake to another. So my skin was pitted and my bones gnarled. My knuckles swollen like plums. So what? I made a battle hymn with trash can lids and learned to box bare-knuckled. My fists changed the cut of men’s brows, and they painted me red and purple in kind. I kissed them afterward, studied the sheen of their cracked teeth and pressed ice against their wrists. My father never learned I was willing to pay in blood to touch men sequined with sweat. I learned: desire is not precious. It beats your ears into puckered ore, it pops your shoulders out of place. To us, the ring is a mattress. With arms locked around each other’s necks, we grind under arena lights, every bulb a facet glinting.

ALT Equinox after Sara Ryan Now, the blades of leaves divide the shadows on the forest floor into split hearts. The wind makes a riot of cold. March slips on green socks, and somewhere a raccoon grips a spear of grass in its muzzle to make it whistle. Floorboards yawn. A sapphire chips out of a robin’s egg, and this is how change arrives. At its most expected, there is still a shock of blood where a girl flattens her knees against the trashed riverbank. Her ribs cradle more breath than blood. Her hands grab at a downpour of maple seeds, and she aims her ankles at a noon-flushed cul-de-sac. She names that place: "memory of toothache and bramble-scratch, a kink at the back of the throat, duskless and gray-puddled and hollow as dovesong." She slides a spiral shell from the brass chain around her neck and watches her trail bend in the sand, away from the water, away from the woods, her steps unmasking shoots arranged like points on a crown.

ALT Cover of a literary magazine featuring text that reads "Tampa Review 67," and a large image of a reddish-orange, rusty sign labeled "Sandman Motel: Vacancy"

ALT "The Michigan Dogman Defends Himself" Abrupt—the sun and guns—they came. The men claim I waged a war? I wailed. I wept. I dug inside the need. I dig where need be. So what if guts, if flank? They took a rare cut of me—this green, where I laid. The grove was home, the thicket shade. Now razed, now slashed: a path for sun and skin. Now all my kin rush far away. The owl haunts the dreams of men, the fox will stalk the yard. And I—my keen will speed men’s hearts and make them sweet with fear. We are the same. Our hunger is not body-bound, but outward shows. They claw the dirt, the coffin-dark. For me, the split earth spills a word: feed.