It looks near the peak like wind has rubbed alpine grass
from the clean-edged boulders like paint from the head
of a statue of a child. You take a photo of Hank and me
in which we are invisible against a mountain of ankle-
breaking gaps.

“Welcome to the building. Save the boy.”
Nikola heard the words distinctly, but there was no one around. She tightened her grip on her backpack strap and turned back to the message board in the dimly lit průjezd. The passage was chilly and darker than it should have been, as if the winter afternoon light had stopped at the threshold and refused to come further.

Spyder woke to rain chewing the tin roof and the smell of somebody else’s cigarettes. For a second he reached where Teresa used to be, fingers finding only cold sheet and a torn seam he kept promising himself he’d stitch. He lay there and listened until obligation got him upright.
His knees cracked when he swung them off the mattress. Forty-seven and already moving like a hinge in need of oil.

My dad died a few months ago and yet I still hear him. I can’t listen to bands like the Doobie Brother’s without hearing his voice in the mix—even if he did make up his own words half the time. I still hear his signature catchphrases that always made my sisters and me laugh.
“He was a prince and a horse, but mostly horse,” he’d say to describe someone.

But it won’t be;
gravis, gravis, gravis,
be sure of that.

The good books tell us
feed the hungry
be kind and loving
to kith and kin

Bridget didn’t believe in love at first sight, but when the pretty girl walked through the door, Bridget would have thought that Cupid himself had stabbed her with a love-laced arrow. It happened quickly, the way things always do when they concern love. Bridget felt the heat rise to her cheeks when, in all her staring, the girl actually stared back. Bridget looked away. She had never seen her before…

Today, I begin as a hollow “O”:
a ceramic lung waiting for the steaming pour,
the sensation of an honest heat.
Mostly, I am grateful for the hands:
the way they cradle my frame.
Not to own. Never to own.

As I get home from the dance studio, I see Mom in the kitchen. Cooking. I’m flabbergasted. Why would my mom be cooking? She hates it. My parents had the arrangement that my dad would cook while my mom would clean. Like everything else in this family, it was taken to the extreme.

We need love
When there’s nothing
Left to share.
We need love
When all is
Hardening cement.
We need love

The mind must break through the chains
Of enslavement and petty property owners.
Emancipate the mind
The heart will follow
The truth, always in turmoil,
Will not fall between the cracks

In 2008, for my college graduation, my family and I took a cruise on the now infamous Carnival Triumph. I don’t recall what we ate for dinner that first night, but I still remember our waiter. A dashing black man with a French accent dazzled us with a card trick before taking our drink orders. Glimmers of chandelier light reflected in his glasses as he introduced himself as Jean Pierre, and his name tag said he originated from Haiti.

BR31. 15 hours and 24 minutes. From JFK to TPE. Departs at 1:33 a.m. I’m going back—to see my family, and of course, you.
When I heard your name from my mom on the phone last night, it felt like only yesterday we had lingered after school, as if time would never touch us—we were on your bike, laughing and talking, or in our usual corner beside the banyan tree

born on Woodridge lane
love nurtures connection
try so hard in a toddler’s arms
first steps first words first school day
first dance first driving lesson

Vance Whitaker was going to win the 1973 Maine State Amateur.
I know there are no sure things in sports, especially golf. It’s a game full of bad breaks. Bad bounces, lip outs, weather that turns on you. Match play only makes it worse. Five rounds over four days can turn anything sideways. Maine golf was no joke in the seventies.

Rowan walked along the oak forest immersed in a conscientious dilemma. He could not decide whether he should enlist in the army to counteract war casualties in Praetorium. He had a conflict between his conscience and his ego. His ego spurred him towards self-preservation whereas his conscience urged him to enlist in the armed forces.
Rowan was a geographer and writer who lived alone in a restored stone cottage in the countryside of Nova Brescia. That year, spring was deployed like an air-inflated parachute on the countryside. On bright days when the mist lifted from the valley and the fields, he could hear the stream flowing along the cottage. Then, he would stop writing to listen to the stream skipping on the grit of the riverbed. The sound of the stream soothed him.

I have found your maternal spirit at the top of the Point as I breathe in the salty mist of the Delaware Bay estuary in Lewes. This is where I have landed. A place I do wish you would have ventured with me. I talk to the sea now instead of you. I talk to the creatures that I believe live in the sea deep within the confines of each ecosystem whether aquatic or in the forests. My conversations in the marsh I will share with you as it is my journey now.

A heart lacking good sense,
chasing after its yearn
like a bull to its treacherous
slaughter, praying
for its plans to see the
light of success

The night—quiet but full of hushed bickering—
returned. I put on headphones, but in vain.
The moon was bright yet restlessly flickering.

Looking at the photos on the wall—once sweet—
I could feel the lies and yelling

Ava O’Brien looked out the window of her compact sewing room in the back of the family’s small house. The summer afternoon fog was thinning and maybe, just maybe, she would see the sun before it set. She was hand stitching the collar onto a new dress for her middle child, while waiting for her firstborn to join her. Earlier that morning, the two had made a two o’clock date. For several days, Bethie had been asking for a new story, from long ago, “from Fernie, Mommy.” Although Maggie and even younger Joe were usually part of her audience, Ava realized that Bethie may be ready for more of a lesson. About her mother’s life, yes, but also about life in general.

When the twenty-four-year-old Paulo Mendes was first moved from the sports department to the hard news department at the O Sol newspaper, he did not expect that his first assignment would be to interview three illiterate shepherd children or that the subject of their discussion would be the alleged apparition of the Virgin Mary. On June 13, 1917, the three youngsters – Lucia dos Santos, aged ten, Francisco Marto, aged nine, and Jacinta Marto, aged seven – had reportedly seen a lovely lady dressed in white, resplendent as the sun, appear in the sky above the hollow of Cova da Iria to give them a message.

In a crowded refugee camp in Bethlehem, Echlas chain-smokes her way through a pack of cigarettes recently purchased by her nine-year-old neighbour. Small for his age, and always smiling, he drops by often to ask whether she needs anything from one of the small shops in the camp. As she talks, smoke fills the small room. Outside, the imam’s faithful call to prayer competes with the shouts of the children playing soccer.

On June 21, 1941, forty-four year old Frida W., a resident of Kyiv, dropped a hand-held mirror, which shattered on impact. This happened around nine PM, at the end of a hot and sunny summer day. (On the evening news, the radio announcer had shared predictions of a record wheat harvest). The mirror fell as Frida was brushing out her hair, which was still black and full and hung down to her lower back.

At thirteen, she wanders
fields near razed homes in Bucha,
hears echoes of cries eerie
in shattered walls. She shelters
in hollows of a hospital turned home.
Once upon a time, she was a child
with eager eyes in search
of trinkets in a greenhouse—

She sits up and the duvet glides across her torso, only covering her body waist down, the humid chill within the room penetrating through her exposed right shoulder where her husband’s T-shirt, which she dons as nightwear, hangs loose. She can’t see clearly because the moon’s a crescent, and it barely lets light into the narrow corridor leading from the walk-in closet to the part of the room that contains their bed