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Love cannot override what cells do in the nighttime of our bodies.

I hold on to the shape of a star the way my aunts hold on to Jesus’s gown.

After nearly a year of dating, I never stopped thinking of that other boy.

He was warm that way, always tender, and maybe that’s the worst part.

He glowered even as a little child. Maybe because he has your bad eyes.

He was trying to seduce me with his history, which was mine as well.

Surely a million mothers and school teachers can’t be entirely wrong.

Never mind the gossip of the world. Don’t have it, yet have it!

She wonders if he will be all right. She assumes he has four-wheel drive.

Somebody would be a lot happier if she were more like her mother.

Spanish men. They whispered and whistled. It made her jumpy.

I crouched just like my mother burying nail clippings to ward off curses.

My mother and I remained apart. My father came late to the party.

This is the woman who had shrunk so small, nobody could find her.

She asked, “What’s the weirdest thing you can do with your body?”

His mother wasn’t there to meet him at his stop. She never was.

And that girls came to his house all the time, cheap girls from the docks.

She looks down the street for Scott’s truck. He’s late but so is she.

Her family was still poor and hungry and scared.

My mother is queen of buttons. She shows off the prized ones.

A goddess was offended; her altar required my virgin blood.

I wanted my love to be everywhere, then love began to bite through me.

Think how you move, how a room changes with your smallest breath.

A memory in the drip, drip, drip of the kitchen sink that won’t stop.

I tell my sister what I didn’t tell my father, I love you. Please, don’t die.

Writing to you is like putting a note in a bottle, hoping it will reach Japan.

I should call my loves while I can to listen to the grackles croak.

He has his hands on Nii’s throat, and this time I do not stop them.

The laughter rises like the roar of a train as the men leap to their feet.