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In the republic of pain, we bloom ice bags and crutches on limbs.

I’m told that even during war, she took the time to put on lipstick.

All my life, I’d been shy, and I wasn’t about to change that.

the woman wiped her hands on her apron saying “lord these children”

No matter how hard I played, it was like I was performing inside a vacuum.

There was something that eluded me, that was always outside the frame.

Abe shot himself, first year out of high school. Assholes said he was queer.

She closed her mind to all familiar shapes and strained back.

Eleanor opened the door to Nick’s bedroom and felt breathless with fury.

Over the air conditioner, she hears, unmistakable, the bleating of a siren.

Don’t send me home without a round of applause if not a title.

Lynn Freed reads from her collection, The Curse of the Appropriate Man.

I arrived that evening barefoot and swathed in a sort of striped toga.

His eyes rested on the trees. By George, it’s like the garden of Eden.

Their leader is a badly wounded boy in need of wounding others.

The baby in her belly is not a sibling, will never be their playmate.

Maybe that’s what she feels, not stranded, but suspended in time.

To keep the baby safe, we sealed the house as if against bad weather.

If you play, decide three things: the rules, stakes, and quitting time.

Before we were ornament, we were names moving in a mouth.

I find lost prayers in the tiny edging around buttonholes.

When we watched jellyfish, Mary Kate wondered if they dreamed of land.

“Your mother’s fine,” Giuseppe said. “We’re all completely fine.”

I returned to research a history we’d only known through stories.

The attendant instructs remember, immerse three times.

I became a symbol of freedom, a miracle who had escaped the Devil.

All that existed was Louisa’s beauty—or Khin’s refashioning of it.

The knife in my mother’s hand flakes into penny-stained rust.

Salve, salve, Regina. As the song ends, he folds into the fabric seat.

Sometimes you weren’t a good daughter, the mother says.