Dragonflies are like Waze. They predict. They don’t chase after mosquitoes, they intercept them, which means they have to calculate the mosquito’s distance, speed, and trajectory. Dragonflies perform these calculations in milliseconds, far faster than Waze, which always takes agonizing seconds to load as it computes the route, average speed of drivers, and quagmires that might await.

When I first saw the bright gold rip of gas flares against the Corpus night sky from the passenger seat of some guy’s green Datsun—all that oil just rushing incinerated into the air—I said, Damn, don’t they know about global warming?

While waiting for the ring I was waiting for his call. And while waiting for his call I was waiting for my finger to heal; the doctor had taken the tip and it had not healed, and then I was putting medicine on it twice a day, covering it with a bandage I had to wait hours to take off, each time.

I was twelve, with little idea of the drying sediment, the vanishing well, under my feet, though as far as I could tell West Texas was desert. A shrug in the middle of forgotten. At the time, I feared one thing only: Dad would die because of me.

The house had a pointed, skinny frame, like a too-tall man. It was a pus-yellow clapboard, perverse against the snow. “Perfect,” Celia said...

When I need my mother most I climb inside my mouth turn left at my incisor teeth turn right at the ghosts of both my grandfathers and find her dancing under the chandelier of my uvula.

Got to be starting              some thing. My father used to                                  catch and                                           modify minor birds with butcher twine.               Revise each one to be more beautiful.

Today, however, all I could think of was the nose of Gogol. The image of a human-sized nose banging on my door.

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