In the mail are two notes from women in his recent past. One says, “I want
to see you.” The other says, “I want to kill you.”   (From “On a Page from Rilke,” Above Ground: An Anthology of Living Fiction, 2009)

Three or four years ago, a black college official at Wayne State U. in Detroit, a mostly black town, startled me by saying, “I know one thing: The world has always been divided into black people and white people, and it always will be.” … (2001.4.7)