Bruce Smith Write like a lover. Write like you’re leaving yourself for another. Write like you’re de Beauvoir, object and subject. Write like you must rescue yourself from yourself, become scrupulous to the body and the rain that floods you with rage and the crude sublimities: there was a lip print on the plastic glass wrapped in the misty domestic interior of the room. Write like there’s evidence, there’s tenderness, like...

Bruce Smith I rode the Greyhound watching the twitchy things of the North give way to the sticky, bloodshot things of the South. No ground so burnt there’s not a church where I heard the Reverend amplify, rarefy, and glorify the word so that we were all in some state of sweating July. The ashy black man and the white bail bondsman held each other until they were blue. I heard the Reverend take the hymn of my mama and the whore’s...