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Some girls

The risk is moral death each time we act,

And every act is whittled by the blade

Of history, pared down to brutal fact,

The fact: we only want what we degrade.

No beauty in the glass makes our loss good,

No hero in the wings can take the stage,

The clash of blood at war with its own blood

Intoxicates us with colossal rage.

A cold beer and the young moon’s tender horns

Are shining on the table where we spar

Like women gladiators, bred and born

To wear our father’s breastplates, greaves and scars.

There’s something not quite right here.

We can’t talk

Like some girls, who’d say, “Hell, the bastards broke our hearts.”

We are a different kind of tough; we hawk

Our epic violence in bleak bars, in bed, in art.

-Suzanne Doyle

Having just broken the water pitcher

Ancient Chinese classification system for animals

a) belonging to the emperor

 (b) embalmed

(c) tame

(d) sucking pigs

(e) sirens

(f) fabulous

(g) stray dogs

(h) included in the present classification

(i) frenzied

(j) innumerable

(k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush

(l) et cetera

(m) having just broken the water pitcher

(n) that from a long way off look like flies

Summer Reading

• The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter (Peter Singer and Jim Mason)
• Portrait of an Unknown Woman (Vanora Bennett)
• If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (Italo Calvino)
• Henry and June: From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin (Anais Nin)
• Lark and Termite (Jane Anne Phillips)
• The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime (Miles Harvey)
• Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (Vladimir Navakov)
• American Victorian Costume in Early Photographs (Priscilla Harris Dalrymple)