My son’s twenty-eighth birthday was the toughest of his birthdays. Birthdays, anniversaries are difficult for me. They remind me not only of the movement of time, but of all the beloveds I have lost.
Too often, I believed I had lost him.

Dark mummified roses standing in the vase,
gray spider webs hanging over every corner.
A broom wipes out the traces of ignorance,
reclaiming the territory once more.

Delwyn nodded to the woman as he walked from his allocated parking space. She was leaning against a directional sign, her legs crossed at the ankles in a pose of inappropriate insouciance, a cigarette paused between her fingers, her face wreathed in a fine gray ash. He thought it unseemly for women to smoke and certainly not a good look for the hospital.

On our way to the family reunion west of Yorktown, Texas, we stop at Uncle Anton and Aunt Frieda’s house. Inside, my sister and I wander among the tumbled syllables of German. It is a language we can no more comprehend than the calls of cows and sheep and chickens.

Hold me in your arms just one more time.
Let me feel you surround me.
Let me feel your embrace.
Your solidness, your security, ever my touchstone.

Robbie Crossman was five when his mother, Sally May, told him Bible stories, but her stories were different than those he heard in Sunday School. Instead of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, her stories were about Robbie himself and his parents. Even at a young age, he knew the place they lived wasn’t Judea; it was Indiana, and Indiana was in America.

Rumbling rain makes stable
rhythms that soothe
rinse clean thoughts that pry—scratch
between
the hemispheres at duel.

I had a reputation for having a surly temperament. The surliness was a defense to the constant beratement from my father and his group at the club. I kept being told I was wrong, but I knew better. They were wrong. They lived in a wealthy bubble, protected from the real world where problems wandered the streets and seeped into the homes and apartments…

life is not a test you pass or fail.
there is no A+ to earn
no standard to surpass
no reward for finishing first.
life is a book.

January is alight in possibilities.
It’s feeling the cold air as you breathe it in, seeing it exhale out.
It’s the smoke the fire sends up the chimney to greet you from the outside.
It’s your back tingling as you warm near its flames.

Sometime things
don’t go as we planned
No forever marriages
loving children at hand

Sometimes we watch
the news with dread

You keep writing in the second person. Why do you keep doing this? I keep writing in the second person. Why do I keep doing this? Interesting, how a shifting pronoun can turn a question into an accusation—transform a benign enquiry into a bludgeon.

Just beyond the road’s edge
in the country of black-eyed Susans
and Russian thistle—

just beyond the crumbling line
where asphalt stops and washboard
gravel begins—just beyond the turnoff

Levi woke up to the insistent sound of his alarm. It had the same rhyming beat as always, but for some reason, it sounded louder this morning, as though he had woken up for the first time in his life.

He sat up, stretching his back until he felt a satisfying pull in his shoulders. At thirty-five years old, his body ached in places that were vaguely familiar. By the time he’d made coffee, his thoughts drifted to his day ahead.

Father Tom’s spiritual awakening struck in the desert. It was the 1960s and Tom was working in Woomera – an area of the South Australian outback harbouring military secrets. “It was a wild time, the 60s. I spent a lot of time partying, playing football, and pursuing women,” Tom tells me as we sit in his living room cluttered with books.

Where fall hangs on into late December are

scattered bay leaves, almond-shaped to the
petiole, petiole as boat draft, wake, tiny

battleships and destroyers from the

admiral’s sky vantage, arranged in naval
maneuvers on the asphalt expanse of Hastings

I divide my life into two parts: before Hiland Mountain and after. The time between I don’t dwell on much. Why should I? It was as bleak as Eagle River’s sky in November, a granite dome strung with nimbus clouds that blocked all light and yielded only biting rain and hail. Through the steel bars, the land around the facility was covered with a thin layer of frost and ice, where off in a distant and unattainable horizon a few dots hinted at Anchorage city life.

A boy floated face down in the clear and silent lake. No wind stirred the surface, though scattered webs of ripples caught the slanting morning sun. The boy wore nothing but his briefs. Minnows darted curiously between his dangling fingers.

He laughed. The sound slipped from his mouth and nose in bubbles, which tickled his face as they sought the open air. Squirming, he flipped over to draw a breath and blink at the pale-blue sky through the drops of water clinging to his lashes. A crow coughed its rough call in the rustling quiet.

It was Wednesday morning, which meant chores and schoolwork were waiting. But they could wait a little longer. Ever since Mama had decided public school was a bad influence and her children ought to be homeschooled, his days had been largely his own.

My father told anyone who would listen that he was an atheist, a foil to his mother’s church immersion. Chanting “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” clutching her rosary as Dad rushed our rented Ford Mustang through a Miami Beach thunderstorm, she frightened me with her fear.

She had a baby
only two weeks ago –
2 pounds, 6 sticks of butter, a sack of flour
a bowl of apples, a bag of caramel sugar
2 pounds of a girl.

She weeps into the bowl of her hands,
her breasts full, her womb a spent sack
her baby, no bigger than a pup…

It was a bright afternoon. Sunlight fell across the benches and paths, making the leaves glow in green and gold. Angelique sat on a bench near the lake, one leg crossed over the other, hands folded on her lap. An older man was beside her, gray-haired and stooped, speaking slowly about hatred. He spoke as though he had carried it all his life and expected to carry it always.

It’s been raining outside for days now. It’s a dribbling kind of rain. No downpours. No thunder. Just dripping, dripping, nonstop. The air feels clammy, almost suffocating.

Inside her office, Dr. Wu reviews her patients’ medical records. The building has air-conditioning. She appreciates a windowless office much more on days like this.

Her office is on the first floor of the hospital and the rehab unit is one floor above. She likes her office because being an introvert, not seeing what’s going on outside of her space suits her well. She likes its peaceful feeling. In fact, she likes it so much that she dreams to write a story or a novel someday and call it “A Room Without A View.”

They laid my mother on the table, a sheet to cover her face from seeing the belly once kissed by men on warm, tropical nights. It looked so different now, sterile. The freckles dotting her pale round belly looked like an infection rather than the constellations. The doctors inserted a scalpel and held plastic buckets on either side, careful to not let the blood spill onto the floor.

Tweet, tweet, tweet,
tandaradei,
set the scene
back in the day;
inside and outside
the heat for master and slave
too hot to handle
even in the basement,
even in the shade