The relief I felt at my father’s funeral was something the old timers had told me to look forward to. Savor it, they’d said. It’s the end of the beginning.
I was sad, of course. But the relief was stronger.
My mother’s funeral, a year prior, had been the beginning. There was much to do, and my two siblings and I did our duty to our mother.

Particularly at this time
I like to look out of the window

Tree branches cutting the picture into pieces
Hanging wires crisscrossing from the poles
The garage roof with its wall block the sight below

Wake Up!
Wake up, Celi!

No, not yet, Cinth
I am far too cold
I need a long shower
I feel like mold

Frank never minded the small things, and as the squeak from the cartwheels bounced off the naked, white walls, he didn’t mind that either.
The hall was dark except the faint glows of the half-lit fluorescent lights that shone on the linoleum tiled floors. The halls themselves weren’t too long, but long enough for Frank’s left knee to start acting up again.

We would walk on the white beach of Marco Island with stale bread wrapped in a recycled red-and-blue polka-dot bread bag. We tossed hardened crumbs while droves of seagulls descended into my mother’s hands peeling shrills of joy. “Jennifer, get a picture of these maniacs!” My mother would laugh with complete abandonment. She would be encircled like a Hitchcock movie with seagulls eating right from her hands.

“He’s coming.” Krystina is the first nurse who spots the new patient’s stretcher in the hallway. Two paramedics walk on each side of the stretcher. Each one holds the rail: one is slightly in the front, the other in the back on the opposite side.
Krystina rushes into the corner room where Julie and Jenny are preparing the patient’s arrival. She waves at Julie, the charge nurse, and then points to the door. Julie gives her a nod of understanding and gestures to Jenny and Krystina to stand by the bedside, one on each side. She straightens her scrub uniform and waits by the door.

When our mother’s back was turned, my sister and I dug our fingers into the warm pie. We felt for stones inside the mushy fruit—feeling for a hardness, sharp at its edges. We were seven and nine. If my father didn’t come home, my mother retreated to her bedroom at the far end of the house, drew the curtains, and closed the door.

DNA remembers…the passage
ancestors transferred, morsels of
inheritance
safely kept in tiny packets
memories within cells
red headed, blonde, brunette
ebony haired mothers

The fluorescent lights of Sunnyvale Manor didn’t flicker, but they hummed with a low-frequency dread that matched the static in Helena’s brain. For six job-searching months, Helena’s world had been the size of a mattress. She knew the topography of her ceiling fan better than the faces of her friends.

in small acts i
carry what came from before me
that fire where:
earth met heat, kept shape, kept
catechisms
on my lips.

Margaret Mary Alacoque saw the Man in the loincloth when she was returning home fromthe dancing and festivities at the great ball which her cousin Corinne had been planning for months. At the time she saw the bearded Man, Margaret Mary was wearing a tight-fitting rose-colored satin gown and was holding her blonde hair in cascading golden curls, all in an effort to play up her beauty and attract potential suitors. When she first saw the bearded Man in the loincloth, she thought He was a specter, for His bloodied body glistened like the moon in the darkness of the night and His smooth lustrous skin appeared to be transparent like a crystal.

I can remember each and every sting. And how even a dead bee can sting. “Hm, look at that,” my father said. And to my five-year-old eyes, the gold-and-black stripes on the hallway mat looked like a key—a shiny key that would unlock who knew what magical adventure. So I picked it up. I don’t remember much else except that I went to kindergarten late that day, my thumb still swollen and red.

The rain started on a Thursday night and it never quite stopped again. The moments which were not absolute downpours were marked by dark, heavy hours of gusting wind and gnarled thunder from some far-off place outside the city. It was as though the sun had turned in her resignation papers. Or was forced to resign in some galactic government coup.

Sort the pieces:
Spread out all the pieces and flip them face up so you can easily see the image; look for similar colors, patterns, and shapes to group pieces together.
* * *
Late one winter afternoon, the department business manager steps into my office, wagging her cell phone in my direction. “Kendra Kimball?” she says.
“Pardon me,” I say to the student sitting across from me. “Who?”

nursing teaches a heart attitude
not learned from studies alone
we become genuine strangers closer than friends
compassionate for physical, spiritual worth
with cores that cannot turn from service
from the courage to feel

Moratok towers above the low-country fog at dawn. Regal his great crown of antlers, the pride of grace. Untamed and almost golden, his neck carries shining slivers of tension. Eyes like dark glass marbles, the tenderness unexpected.

My big brother, the eldest among us siblings, had to take the final highly competitive middle school entrance exam—a nightmare for 10- to 12-year-old kids aiming for the best schools. Determined to give him the best chance, Dad transferred him to a class taught by his friend…

My car, a rust-infested attendant of me,
reliably pressing on, content with its
purpose to the bitter end, an endearing
thought that overtakes me suddenly and
intensely, that there will soon come an end

It was cruel that Elder Raena had survived the harshest winter in thirteen years only to die on the fifth day of spring. The remaining three members of the village knew the day was near and feared what it required of them next. Her body was getting colder, more frail over the past two weeks despite the growing warmth in the air.

I squeeze past a bedraggled goat and other passengers as I snag a stained seat by the window. My foot gently scooches a live chicken to the side while I stuff my belongings below me on the floor. The scented mixture of sweat and damp livestock permeates the air. Outside the bus window where I sit in Nchelenge, young boys shout at riders to buy food. I open a book, attempting to tune out all the chaos around me.

anyway, i keep thinking about the old laptop we passed around after school,
blue light pooling over our faces like a second puberty—hot,
cords under your desk, knotted around our feet.

My mornings always began the same way—I woke up and saw the wall. On that wall was a thin strip of torn wallpaper that grew wider and wider each day. If I managed to tear off too big a piece, I knew it was time to cut my nails.

There’s no proper reaction when your mother tells you over the phone, “Your father is dead.”
And how words hang in your throat as she explains, through sobs, he died in a tractor accident, when the vehicle flipped, and the rear tire ran over his head—he took his last breath in your mother’s arms.
So you book the fastest flight from San Diego to Pittsburgh.

She never forgets to water the piano
So that under her fingers white rivulets
Punctuated by black peninsulas
Maintain the tonal integrity
Of each percussive encounter.