Beneath my dress is a ladder of desire,that I climb tonight and each night after that.

Even after she was gone, he passed her place each day: something white in a high window - not a face,but the white belly of a pigeon beating its wingsagainst the pane in the boarded-up house.

Writing from the perspective of women survivors of violence, Moore is at his most appealing; though his writing about sex and brutality can verge on the exploitative, he sometimes reveals an unexpected sympathy with dominated women.

So many women come to me saying, “I have lost too,and this one, and this one”. So many embryos retreatto flesh: the live cell of the mother. Don’t tell me that itwill happen for me, when the only sure thing is a miracle:the sperm nuzzling in its nest and the egg that opens, explodes.