Richard M. Berlin, MD

"Hat factories closed quiet as prayer books, and loss lingered in my father’s guts like unswept garbage after a big parade..."

"Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite."

"It was a time when men wore fedoras banded on the crown, each band with a feather tucked into a bow, and inside, sweat bands carved from calf skins with their sweet smell of animal and earth."

"Of her choice virtues only gods should speak, Or English poets who grew up on Greek (I’d have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek)."

This book offers positivity via a unique form of poetry.

"I know I have the blood of survivors coursing through my veins; I know the lament of our loss must warm us again and again down in the belly of the whale..."

Discover how this thought-provoking novelette by a psychiatrist weaves rich characters, a suspenseful plot, and profound insights, leaving readers pondering the complex questions it raises about God, violence, and human compassion—and feeling moved.

"His wing Scythes down another day, his motion Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear The crashless fall of stalks of Time."

"Oh for a stronger magic, that I could wave my arms and reach deep inside my white coat pocket..."

"The sounds of the world at this late hour sadden you, but then enters the rain, hastening down, the rain that wants to touch everything and almost does."

"My hands grown tired, my head weighed down with dreams..."

"Oh for a stronger magic, that I could wave my arms and reach deep inside my white coat pocket, the mass vanished..."

"And when they bombed other people’s houses, we protested but not enough, we opposed them but not enough..."

"What luck—an open bookstore up ahead..."

"For months she has dreamed in red..."

"Tornado or torbellino or something else, I ask her about the valley’s strange wind. And she laughs, says that she was calling to ask me the same thing."

"As if this big dangerous animal is also a part of me, that somewhere inside the delicate skin of my body, there pumps an 8-pound female horse heart, giant with power, heavy with blood."

"Eyes locked on the flat-lined monitor, she hears the last drop gurgle, the team quiet and calm in a lake of blood."

"...he put gently into the earth some plants which, most likely, some of them, in all likelihood, continue to grow..."

"Too often summer days appear, Emblems of perfect happiness, I can't confront..."

"...and remember the white and bloodless world I knew before I fell in love."

"By the first of August, the invisible beetles began to snore and the grass was as tough as hemp and was no color..."

"...everything known and unknown for longer than I have searched or breathed, the infinity of my ignorance."

"The dark pours down, sticky as Coke, but the light from the kitchen gleams like a beacon."

"So many things look absurd from a distance that people still take seriously..."

"At O'Hare, at Atlanta, at Dallas/Fort Worth, it happens every trip, at LaGuardia, Logan, and Washington Dulles, the customary strip..."

"She was clear-eyed and dying when I knew her, soft breaths feathering from her chest like distant smoke..."

"The Child is father of the Man..."

"It is not a place out there but a place in here. I catch on its barbed wire in both places."