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Mothersexpand_moreThe letter both pleased and disturbed her. Why did he get in touch?
There in front of the house was his son’s ratty old Thunderbird.
It was on a mid-June morning that the stranger first called.
The eyes looked into his own with a meaning, a malign significance.
I am eleven years old and too young to die, but I am dying nonetheless.
I am eleven years old and too young to die, but I am dying nonetheless.
If, on your deathbed, you want to watch a movie, don’t let me pick.
“He’s a mad dog on a chain. You don’t stick your fingers in his mouth.”
The face of love is a poem I am writing in an air-conditioned room.
Your mother still glows with a smoothness that you envy.
He whispers words that sound as miraculous as the skinned fish of the clouds my father writhed like pentecostal snakes while he drove drunk
She accused her husband with great drama of having destroyed her life.
This storm scares me. A foreign climate occupies the land.
Of course he escaped. He would be the one. My legendary brother.
He only told the world what the world wanted to hear from a guy who graduated from Harvard.
No fountains to quench the thirst between rounds of tag.
Sneaking was one thing, entering a bar with a someone else’s ID another.
Part of me wished I’d never tried heroin. The rest wanted to be high.
Mafia didn’t like me, except for the tickling game. It went like this.
He’ll probably try to get her in the sack, just to stay in practice.
Every dawn you’d toss the feed, your hands faithful to the good work of rising.
I had to prepare. I had to be able to save us from what was coming.
If your father were here, he wouldn’t put up with your insolence.
The moment in your drunk when you become rich! A connoisseur.
“For the entire time I was there I couldn’t get that out of my head.”
In the rooms you picked up what you liked, like shells on a beach.
We chose to stay in the brutality of that night, even as the girls walked away.
The first time the world demanded more of me, I was twenty-nine.
It takes a strong woman to make any sort of success in the West.
Ma didn’t believe in slapping. It was what common people did.
