Explore

Not long after Christmas, the smoke really hit Melbourne.

“Jesus Christ,” Dad said, after the counselor spelled it out for him.

I remember a field too long as the stem of a pear chosen in Upstate.

The woman who raised the woman who raised me was a mistress.

Our neighbors the Bells are watching, watching us when we play outside.

Eight years, and she was ready to call it quits. They were both ready.

Mom often went to work on her days off. The library was her refuge.

It could be our baby. Her eyebrow, its perfect arc, the pale blue vein.

Even in death, my mother had to make things difficult for me.

It was here—over the highway—where my mother got confused.

My daughter swallows arrows of sunlight on her way to the grave.

Now he was all out of dreams, out of rage, expectations, and money too.

The fog’s sheen is a mirror: my mother sees the terrain of the future—

This kind of childhood stuck with a person, twisted things up.

He was so frail, how could your heart not break when you saw him?

How can we go on believing each day won’t be the one that flames out?

He was getting a divorce. I was married with two teenage children.

I say aria, scale of the day, weigh each square foot she’s kept up.

Did Sharon and Roy make it harder or easier for their mother to leave?

Death is our common ancestor. It doesn’t care who we have dined with.

My mother taught me to rebel within the boundaries of acceptability.

she thrust to where her gut bucked acid & gave out a taurine heave

I see now that motherhood is not required to speak a mother tongue.

He smelled like the bars my mother took me to in the middle of the day.

The purple-eyed women on her mom’s side began generations ago.

I reviewed the rules for myself, among them: stay in the moment.

My mother hoped moving would erase the affair with a married man.

I used to be known for the humor of my music, the lightness of touch.