Jasper looked up at the clear, starlit, advent sky. A sharp north easterly had blown away the relentless gloom of the past fortnight and he gladly breathed in the nipping December air. He thought of the fingerless gloves he’d left behind at the church after rehearsal the previous evening. He would miss them this morning and considered for a moment passing the vicarage to see if they could be retrieved.

We were already deep in the Amazonian rainforest, in the borderland between Peru and Brazil, based in a camp somewhere along an unnamed tributary of another tributary of the Rio Javari that marks the border, and that morning we rose early to travel by canoe yet deeper into the forest. Local hunter Alejandro had encountered a large adult anaconda and was willing to take us there.

January 6, 2021, marked a pivotal moment in American history, serving as a wake-up call and a profound division. The shocking scenes of rioters breaching the Capitol stirred a visceral reaction across the nation. While the vast majority of Americans were horrified by the chaos, the interpretations of that day have since diverged sharply.

There’s life on other planets, and we’re fighting again.

Not so much fighting each other, me and Hazel, but rather the hundred little obstacles we confront daily in the world: electric bills, uninsured vehicles, the price of groceries—it’s a love language in itself that we’re each willing to be the other’s proxy for all these petty aggravations.

When the need for this routine is exhausted, from my phone I will play serious, dramatic music like Vivaldi or some Dies Irae thundering, and we will each see how long we can continue arguing. It’s become a playlist of losing first-smirks.

After 24 years of being a nun, Juliette (name changed) left the convent. It was 1986. Juliette’s spiritual longing – unsatiated by the convent – was as strong as ever. So three years later, when she met Brendan, a charming, charismatic, striking man who ran spiritual workshops drawing on the wisdom of the world’s greatest traditions, she took notice.

My cellphone dinged — it was an Instagram reel from my sister, Glynn. I opened the link and glamorous 1950s movie star Cyd Charisse filled my screen, dancing ecstatically in a shimmering yellow dress, surrounded by perfectly synchronized dancers.

Alice couldn’t remember her dream, but the thought that lingered after waking shook her. She had nothing to give him.

She had fallen asleep on the couch, not easily or accidentally, had forced herself to sleep, exhausted herself with praying and reciting the memorized routes that would take them to their new home. She pictured the highlighted maps from AAA with her eyes closed, stacked in the glove compartment in the order they would need them.

There were still pieces of the dream, but she disregarded them…. It was still so early that her young siblings had not yet jumped out of bed to come raid the stockings or shake the presents that they would open after breakfast.

this too shall end.
This too shall end.
This too shall end—
from a place in the basement corner bedroom
beneath boarded-up windows in the back of the house
where she hid from the noise of an Alaskan summer solstice
of driftwood bleaching, refused to watch the harbor pier

I often imagine if people were to ask me what I was feeling the day Zeus came to me, I doubt they would anticipate my reply. I prayed, not to Zeus, not to Hades, not to Apollo, nor Poseidon or any other god. No, I prayed to Hera.

Walking back to the squad car carrying two fresh wrapped pastrami sandwiches, my heart is pounding and hands sweating, the growl in my stomach doesn’t drown out the voice in my head that scolds me, “See. You should have listened to your old man, you idiot.”

It took me three years to read your letter. Back in 2018, when I didn’t really understand the process, I thought ‘pen sketch’ meant an artist’s drawing of the sperm donor. I didn’t look at it as I didn’t want to see you. Not then. I didn’t want to choose a donor based on looks and I didn’t want to identify a stranger on the faces of my prospective children. Later, when I joined groups for donor assisted families, I discovered – by chance when reading a Facebook post – that the so called ‘pen sketch’ was not a picture, it was a letter.

When Othello first arrived, my grandmother declared that he should be called Prince, but she soon changed her mind and named him after the Moor who killed his wife Desdemona because he was sure that she had betrayed him. When I asked her why she had changed the dog’s name to Othello, she responded that it was an appropriate name because his hair was black as vicuñas wool and because he was fiercely jealous.

willed by the rain
washing over me.
slow at first,
it filled the bank.
drowning in emotions
I built a dam.

Romania is a different culture
It has high mountains
Low valleys
And Roma wandering the roads
Byways and small lax villages.

Blessed Margaret of Castello was a blind, hunchbacked dwarf whose aristocratic parents could barely stand the sight of her. Born in Metola, Italy, in 1287, she spent her childhood isolated from the world because her parents found her so repulsive that when she was six years old, they had a small cell built in the forest next to their chapel and locked Margaret away like a lunatic.

As sticky as syrup-soaked gruel
eyes closed with dreamy leftovers
eyes closed tightly as if seamstresses
sewed those viscous visions inward.

What now?
Rose.
Rose was the only person I trusted, the only one who was kind to me that day. I went for a long walk and wound up at a quiet park where bushes exploded with red and yellow flowers reaching for the sky. Too late, I noticed three guys closing in behind. The last thing I remember was the smell of their sweat and the red mud caked on their boots.

You are cold,
to my palm,
to my cheek,
cold to my tongue.

Elonda stared out of her window, squeezing her face into the entire frame, and her breath began to fog up the dew-struck glass. She quickly used her sleeve to wipe away a near perfect circle. The winter was visible again.

Miss Beulah was not worried about a few dead feral cats, especially the ones that had lived for years in her woodpile before they met their sanguinary demise. She had discovered them gruesomely slaughtered with violent gashes to their necks just after a weak, late autumn hurricane had wreaked havoc on her yard and flooded her collard patch. Apart from believing that a bobcat had done the killing, her only real concern was removing the corpses from her yard. But a week later …

June 1941
“Get up,” I whisper, crouching on the concrete, grasping the bars with fingers picked raw and bloody. I consider rapping the bars with the key — the precious key!— but I don’t dare. The guard might be a light sleeper.

Because my head is full of one hundred flowers.
Because dandelions were taken; ditto orchids
(each a bookend on the hardy-to-fragile spectrum).
Because I don’t compete with or covet the rich
and shallow soil but trade in the depths of mingled roots.

Lying amidst terra cotta
shards, in backyard rituals
we stared at a bleaching dot
of sun, hoped tanning might
remind us of no—bad—days. I told you

Home is a mold, that I cast upon you
in the shape of this poem, that fits only you.

Home was the way you described every color:
hunter green, sunset orange, and midnight blue.