[[bpstrwcotob]]
Different Ways to Bathe
She’s of an age where a little something sometimes appears in her underpants.
Self-Portrait
I don’t want to go to the neurologist, but my family insists something is wrong because I am rhyming words and predicting the weather.
Braids and the Meaning of Life
As a child, I was in awe of girls with braids. Girls whose hair was set in strictures like Sunday sermons.
Before the I-5, My Father Was Mexican
While attending a conference in San Diego, I am cooped up in a hotel that is coincidentally on the same street as my paternal family’s first home in America.
God is a Catfish from the White River in Martin County, Indiana
God is a catfish from the White River in Martin County, Indiana and we would eat Him on Summer Sundays after Mass.
FDA APPROVED OPERA SERIA
The distorted face has always been her forte. The distorted face is the contrabassoon. I’m grimacing.
Invocation
Kingsessing in Southwest Philadelphia is a low country of porches and brick. A long green edge where Cobbs Creek keeps the seasons and the city sets its weight down
When the Veil is Open
You can’t find morels without your father’s eye trawling the deadwood and bramble for you. Thrashers thrash in the canopy, busking their duplicitous song while chipmunk and squirrel weasel through foliage, striped firecrackers.
In Passing
The copperhead slithers along without bending / Its spine. The ridges on its underside are like / boot treads. / That was the example I was using / Until he thought I was calling him a snake.
(Maternity) Leave
There is a stretch of the most precious time in the mornings, after your husband has gone to work, when the baby wakes up and you feed her and she falls asleep on your chest, her small arms holding your torso, their full length barely reaching the edges of your back.
Laws of Motion
once, you said everything keeps moving until something stops it / so I wonder if it was time that slowed us / or the quiet between what we meant and what we said
Two Pieces
“Make me a promise,” she said to him when they were lying in bed, although it was not night, and he said, “What promise?” and she said, “You shouldn’t have to ask.”
I Am in a Room Alone
with the only music of the morning traffic, those who must rise to drive to labor, and a window often curtained and closed, and in winter, the radiator hissing, the kind from another century, the kind you must be careful or it will burn you.
Lunar Logic
There is a prequel and a sequel, then the cataclysm returns to its chrysalis, an odorless and colorless but very viscous liquid. It's been nanoseconds since my last deathbed confession.
Morning in the Burbs
Rain or shine, goldfinches light up my day with their bubbly chatter. Unless they perceive a threat then they turn stone quiet.