"Because I am now parent to my parent Because a brain is a machine that sometimes misfires and I see the sparking panic in my mother’s eyes Because I am an expert in hot crossed wires Because my song is sweet and wet the same melody she sang to me as a child"

"I will fill out a questionnaire on the quality & sound of my thoughts... & score highly. Tomorrow, I will wake up & hear every version of “It Had to Be You” at once. A traveling tour of Les Misérables is coming to town. Soon after, the State Fair, with food trucks & pigs."

"Shoppers and store clerks notice her, stare, and I wonder if she’ll be kicked out by management or security... And so, I shadow her like a maternal umbrella... Don’t you dare judge her I say with my posture. If you un- zip her exterior, she will fill this whole store with light"

"I never knew the river the whale the storm the sea. I needed a better word for linger. I kept trying to heal with one hand what the other injured; I keep trying to predict where Venus will rise."

"No means No, even if it bends like a willow in your wind It is a gift, this sweet underside, a woman’s flesh, a place babies come from & healing—like salicylic acid that lines willow branches, a headache cure, our grandmothers chewed the soft twigs—but a man isolated the acid"

"I was broken, which might seem like a cliché, but I tell you, man, my spirit was crushed & a tide of emptiness washed over me...where I’m standing ankle deep in the surf, looking out toward the horizon where a single freighter is lit up in the darkness like a Christmas tree."

There is a loveliness to incompletion, the way a robin’s egg lying cracked on the sidewalk is always an aria... O bleed. O bless the wisdom of my body reminding me through pain, through color, through the haze of my own willful ignorance: my rebirth may look a lot like violence.

"i believe you wanted to hurt me, the right way, to save me from the wrong pain. your pain. my mother loved me wrong, too... it is never the absence of love that lingers longest: i have wanted to hurt someone the right way, too."

"and if next I wave down the car and kiss my boys’ palms, they won’t think Today we might come home to bad news— because I am always like this; every day, the same harried love. But also: in this poem, a woman unravels at night."

When my grandfather passed, blade-thin, after months spent gasping for a teaspoon of air, my mother told me the truth “Dying is hard” she said. “Watching it happen is even harder to endure” Decades later, trailing a wisp of smoke I wasn’t ready to watch drift away, I understood