Me, my sisters, my brother, the older cousins, the younger cousins, we squeezed in wherever, even in the crevice behind the backseat, meant to be the trunk.
Me, my sisters, my brother, the older cousins, the younger cousins, we squeezed in wherever, even in the crevice behind the backseat, meant to be the trunk.
I showed up at the agreed-upon time with the fixings for a birthday pizza picnic party …
A moment of frozen time, preserved for two alone.
I opened my eyes and saw a paramedic kneeling beside me.
The black pleather sofa was well worn from the tired bodies of so many young people that had come before me.
At first I thought it was a burlap bag left on the road by workers; summer is the only feasible time frame in Michigan for construction.
The noise is painful.
Yes, they told me, the singer of the band is your old boyfriend.
“Mommy, I don’t love you.” My two-year-old stands in the bathtub, smudging foam onto her belly.
The stray black kitten, known to neighborhood kids as Silky, climbs up the screen door to peer into our living room.
I dance on tiptoes over low-lying nettles, emerging into the shimmering glade as coos descend from up in the rustling canopy above.
Passing through Christmas, Michigan, I nearly missed the tall, thin man standing on the berm of the two-lane state highway.
I bask in the warm cinnamon heat, wishing I had held back till we finished the sugary churro funnel cake she had ordered with uninformed optimism.
We three siblings, on a long-awaited pilgrimage, walk up and down aisles and aisles of gravestones, some modern and readable, some old and fallen.
Today I’m Susan B. Anthony, grateful that I’ve not added twenty-five pounds of undergarments.
We sat close on the lunch table bench and passed the pencil between us, writing quickly into a notebook, filling two columns with our invented words and their translations.
A stray follows the man who picks plastic from the beach every morning.
They brush past me and my child in his wheelchair. Hurrying, scurrying. I try not to recoil.
Today, he said, we will not have sex, and I was pleased and released and buried my face in his sanctioned holiday. [CW: Sexual Abuse]
… Deborah said some creep behind us kept gawking at her. I whirled around.