Thomas Lynch

Once she even successfully argued on behalf of my older brother, Dan, getting a BBGun, a weapon which he promptly turned against his younger siblings, outfitting us in helmet and leather jacket and instructing us to run across Eaton Park while he practiced his marksmanship. Today he is a colonel in the army and the rest of us are gun-shy.

The girl who climbed up the water tower. We would have counted her an accident until the medical examiner found breaks and fractures from her hips to her heels. "You fall head first," he said. "Feet first's a jump.

I had this theory. It was based loosely on the unremarkable observation that the old are always looking back with longing while the young, with the same longing, look ahead. One man remembers what the other imagines.

I'm more interested in the meaning of funerals and the mourning that people do. It's not a retail experience. It's an existential one.

But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.

Well the themes for me were and remain sex and love and grief and death - the things that make us and undo us, create and destroy, how we breed and disappear and the emotional context that surrounds these events.

The world's supply of heartache is secure. There's love and hate and mayhem everywhere.

The flush toilet, more than any single invention, has 'civilized' us in a way that religion and law could never accomplish.

The realization that God could be female required the consideration that the Devil could be also.

It hurts so bad that I cannot save him, protect him, keep him out of harm's way, shield him from pain. What good are fathers if not for these things?