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She was here. She could not go on. It was the end—the end of the world.

Hard to know what a prisoner believes, what the guard presumes.

Our grandmothers were bakers and nurses, spies and traitors.

The night before my mother’s double mastectomy, we went skinny-dipping.

You are home in your bed like a soft animal with really intense feelers.

Walking on Canal Street, I slipped on the curb and fell on my face.

All of those feelings—you do not have them, they have you.

These days, I am less of an irony detector and more of a lyrical drone.

He loathed them most, despising their desire to get on with things.

A family becomes fossilized—a darker crosshatch etched in hard sand.

The year we left the reservation a white boy gave me a trash bag.

Come winter, they go to the funeral early & count the living.

My father’s paperbacks, 35 cents a pop, forgotten on the high shelves of my bookcase. My father found pleasure in hardboiled dicks, half-clad dames, and misogynist jokes.

Peering into the soap bubbles, she briefly imagined herself inside one.

Having held down the past applying pressure to its sacrum . . .

Stocking shelves, like serving, is a job that will not let go of your mind.

I remember the sun on the mountain like a trembling drop of lava. When the lasso dancers were done, they kicked away like wild colts.

He was caught. Of course he was caught. He was always caught.

I know what it means to be born in one life and meant for another.

The judge’s mother was impossible; her mere presence was infuriating.

We work to house the water yet know we cannot keep anything.

Any white man without a servant was presumed to be in need of help.

When the thugs from the bank showed, up my father laughed.

Claim to be Choctaw or Cherokee. Claim to be a princess too.

You are the only one who knows not to pour water on the flame.

I only divine the cat’s location when I hear its small cough.

He was a child. He was dead. He was the shaft of a Long-tailed Astrapia.

It had always been this way. Mothering, for my mother, was a cameo role.

The solution, she’s discovered, is always to err on the side of caution.

My brush dissects her slick-back black hair to expose ugly white.