Rain or shine, goldfinches light up my day with their bubbly chatter. Unless they perceive a threat then they turn stone quiet.

On Christmas Eve as teens, we amble Georgetown’s lamplit streets, fingers linked, kissing, your upper lip prickly with that faint mustache some girls get. Your dad is a basement shut-in, a bald guy with myalgia.

Allow me to run from America and, if it be Your will, / Have Germans roll out their welcome mats / As America opened her arms to my parents / When they escaped Berlin in the ’30s.

Don didn’t care if it would storm. They were here to fish, he and his son, and they needed a break in their luck. Yesterday was merciless, snags and empty stringers. The other fishermen, however, caught more Walleye than they bothered to count.

"Draw me a mermaid, Mommy." “Okay,” I answer my two-year old daughter. She watches me outline the figure in pencil on pink construction paper. The mermaid turns out to be feminine, unashamed of her bare breasts, and ready to swim in a dangerous ocean. I envy her.

stay kin stay kin stay kin stay kin / stay kinder to myself stay kinder to myself stay kind stay alive / I want to stay kind I want to stay alive I want to stay kind I want to stay alive I want to / stay alive stay kind stay be alive be kinder to myself be kinder to myself