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Something has to be what this is, old and primitive, and it sounds like this.

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.

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

In the Nablus apartment she remembers rolling hills of citrus.

The everlasting shines through in the threshold between worlds.

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

Before April rings the chime, she forces her way up out of herself.

The attendant instructs remember, immerse three times.

Fletcher was a squad leader. He ought to be able to get a girl.

A romp through everyday dramas with Hemingway, Kafka, and more!

Of all she taught me I like best the lore of spray-on cologne.

Her body had become a scale, a device for measuring grief.

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

Mild nights would have us out of doors—at their opening I am rapt.

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

Cheer and cheer and cheer she sings a song on nesting wings.

With a world full of foolishly dangerous men, what’s a mother to do?

Most people come to Africa because they are drawn to its misery.

As our friendship declined into torture, the prairie grew hotter.

She wags her index finger so furiously that I’m certain it will snap off.

She’s coming back, her arms full of the flowers I gave her once a year.

Elinor had loved a man. The journey’s purpose was that she might forget.

Men can’t sense like that. Or won’t. Even a father don’t dare get that close.

What were the unsafe things to say even in a thirty-year marriage?

I keep dripping milk until I’m sitting in a pool of it, sticky, white. I can’t move.

She was so happy they were going to save her from the city of Dallas.

It is not surprising that her solo marathon did not turn out as planned.

She rocks quickly from side to side, proud, lifting herself higher.