Tony Hoagland chose Dane's poem as a finalist, which was published in Purdue University's Sycamore Review (Winter/Spring 2005):
Accordions & Shotguns
Opal stands with an accordion at twenty-one years of age,
on the steps of the family’s 49th Street house in Los Angeles.
It is 1934, and the land of angels breaths in then out
like the ribs of her instrument. My father poses next,
little brother, all of six years old, shoeless, grinning,
the world spread out in front of him like an endless field
through which he runs. The back alleys and parks,
strewn with beaten trash can lid shields and stick swords,
Chinese boys behind the market tossing rocks like grenades,
the sand at Venice beach where black kids would wrestle
with brown and the white of his skin didn’t matter
because the city was his, he didn’t need much,
was protected from harm, from the want there was
by dashing older brothers who’d appear as right out of a movie screen,
with their polished white shoes and slicked back Hollywood hair,
letting him reach deep into pocket to fish out fistfuls of coin,
who’d show up the very day the electricity was to be turned off,
lay a few greygreen bills in mothers calloused hands, the ones
that had been up all night wringing & folding in hard-bitten prayer,
the miracles that always seemed to follow after: a pair of shoes,
a bag of groceries. A young boy, he had no word for depression,
neither the 30’s, nor his own that would come later.
There was no such thing as not enough, only the wonder
of what you had, the house where so many relatives came and went,
his bed a couch, this bevy of siblings, lovers and wives old
as uncles & aunts, being the youngest of twelve, the tag-a-long,
and always the next miracle they brought. Like shotguns in the desert,
Opal and Lloyd and brother Leslie out in the Mohave,
cooking eggs and bacon at dawn, cocking their huge, long rifles
loaded with shells—hunting rabbit, hunting what you can still find
when you’re young, and your country’s young, and the war is still
a ways off, and the world’s a swirling dream you can shoot at
in the hugeness of sky and not worry about a thing. Later,
those things would happen: accordion lost with its music;
shotguns emptied, buried in the basement; a war or two
working their way through onto Hollywood screen, and
you’d barely recognize anything—what your life was to become,
what it actually became, the miracle that it is still somehow yours,
that you love it anyway—how you carry the violence like a spent shell
in your pocket to remember, your ribs expanding and contracting
with each breath as though you are an instrument
life is still learning how to play.