“one or two / lines from the poem / using slash to indicate line breaks.”

“ There are an unimaginable number of crows before you, cawing and making clicking sounds. Some of them are already tapping on the windows. Some of them are already in the house. One of them is in front of your dog, who is trying to make himself as small as he possibly can be.”

“You said it was the only ​thing you had left of your father. We fell silent shortly after and watched the waves do their sloshing dance along the streets.”

“You are accepting the reality of a family reunion.”

“These are her thoughts as she tries not to touch the summer’s welts and lumps and itches that insects have bestowed on her, as she notices waterbugs accumulating on the glue traps placed on the kitchen floor each month by the exterminator, as she tries and tries to swat the fruit flies multiplying around the rim of the covered compost bin, as she learns that certain beetles are chewing up the most ancient trees on Earth, as she reads Oliver Milman on the tricks and tribulations of insects.”

“We’re sitting by the fireplace on a new moon night. He says to me, aren’t you ever sad we can’t travel the world? Wouldn’t you like to see the Duomo in Italy or the beaches in Morocco? Don’t you feel trapped…with me? I imagine folding clothes into a suitcase, boarding a plane with ticket in hand, looking out the window—the scenery getting closer, everything taking shape. It would be a lie to say I was always happy with the life I lived, but how could I say that to him. How could I say to him, yes, I dream of running away from you? “

“your feet grow wet / still you kneel / with the net in your palms / fishing for his cracked pieces / moon jellies floating”

“At the store for more dryer sheets, I see someone slide their hand in an O down some other daughter’s ponytail. I know the next part of the joke—he loops it around her neck like a rope. I was a daughter, too, when I learned daughters are always at the hazard of augers.”

“Santa sips herbal tea as he waits for winter, peppermint steam mingling with crisp autumn air. He wanders into the bedroom and crawls under the blanket with me. We spend afternoons hidden from the world, only the soft crooning of the record faintly drifting in from the living room.”

“Even when I was awake, fear dogged me. As my mom carried Finnegan down the street, I imagined her tripping and slamming into the concrete sidewalk. I pictured myself stepping over my injured mother to tend to my son, the necessary horror of casting her aside.”

“Everyone is getting ready in the falafel restaurant / they let us use for a dressing room.”

“For the next several years, Mom was parasite-free. But then we heard rumors that an aunt had set her up with someone she encountered through her occasional hobby of drunk driving. My aunt had met this man at one of their court-ordered AA meetings. He owned a house, supposedly. He owned his own business, supposedly.“

“I wish they could see / everything that survived, everything / that came back, like the drooping / head of an untended flower brought / upright by careful attention.”

“Her daughter - my daughter - delights in those peach-colored orbs floating in a sea of sugary coral, but her daughter - my daughter - didn’t come home last night from the hospital. The woman, unlike her daughter, returned home to find the cupboards bare, waiting.”

“A circle is the same shape as our children’s eyes when they ask me what’s for dinner and all I can say is bread because Spiros is busy attaching square wheels to our cart since he says the angles will create both the “necessary drag” while going downhill and also deter robbers. “

“ … I wish / I could show them the widening gyre / of debris choking their Pacific Ocean / reduced to a clear-eyed patch of sea / and the countless animals rehomed / there now.”

“That night she goes out in joggers and a puffer. She walks miles through busy city neighborhoods and industrial wastelands, along a commercial thoroughfare, unnoticed.”

“Of course, Anne Boleyn wasn’t really Anne Boleyn, either.  I like to think she was Mary Magdalene, though I can’t know for sure.  And Mary Magdalene wasn’t really Mary Magdalene, either.”

“It’s hard to explain a life built around avoidance. Any town too small for public transit was too small for my taste in men, women, cocktails, and shouting at starless skies.”

“Abe wanted it to look like a dinosaur, with big teeth and hard scaly armor all over its body. I thought it should look more like a caterpillar, or a cocoon that some ultra-mega savior would spring forth from.”