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Like a god I shook their tiny worlds, terrible but ineffectual storms.

He hadn’t meant to hurt her. Drowning people will do anything for air.

The clearest memory was when his father shot a grizzly.

Now I’m no longer the buzzards glooming over the mango tree.

My ups and downs never stop on the hump we call a hill behind the house.

We’re all trying, in our own ways, to parse what we may have done wrong.

Books covered every available surface and much of the floor.

Their days go over in idleness, and they sigh if the wind but lift a tress.

This summer I mothered my brother’s death; I brothered my mother’s cancer. My brother and mother died this summer, two of seven billion.

Her skin was bruised under her eyes, purple like the swollen toe.

Maybe all of it was possible. Maybe it all could work out.

You remind me of lizards birthed in an outhouse by an ogre or a loon.

“Mind you come straight home,” Mrs. Heywood always says.

Up there there’s not a sound except for the wind and the buzzing of bees.

The horror of the waste appalls me. This beauty. This habitation of dream.

Cassandra blared Puccini and Eminem so she would not pray.

My mother could get me to obey without ever touching me.

A man jostles my stride to the street, no shoulder on which to move.

She was thinking about what she would say when the time came.

They need to be named, loved, then unnamed to be seen once more.

I thought that proved he blamed me. I thought they all did.

What better place to write the great American novel than North Africa?

My children, children, remember to let me go, delete my number.

I grip the handlebar and pin my eyes shut, waiting for the inevitable crash.

She pulls quickly on her cigarette and blows it at me through the phone.

It was comforting to see her suffer the way we suffer, hollowed out.

My father was at an awful disadvantage in a sport where cunning is a virtue.

What my father and I destroyed, I take back—kneeling, among the shells.

“were all here pregaming. at my dads apt. Wher the duck are u.”

No one answered. I turned to his parents. My stomach felt on fire.