I made my mom promise me that she was going to live until she was 100 years old, and I would be 82 and we would die together, peacefully, holding hands. 

My siblings and I never liked each other as much as we did on those early mornings; we never made a better team. 

It doesn’t make the sound that you think it would make. I mean, I figured it would be loud, or top-heavy. But it sounded like almost nothing, like water dripping from a shower faucet three rooms

You’re from the cornfields, I tease, but not really. Your parents, professors at U of Illinois, both versed in the theories of music, both of them concert pianists. They play hushed, reverent duets

Carefully open the wrapping paper. Inside is Teddy Ruxbin. See his stupid face on the box. Fuck you, Teddy Ruxbin. He reads you bedtime stories if you put a cassette tape in his abdomen.

In this one, nothing will happen, like in life, unlike in life, where everything happens.

I grew up in grass but here / everything is bladeless, // hair thinned past feathers, / sheets slick enough to grease a boar.

So a few weeks before that Christmas, I decided to do some detective work. I was interested in science and generally curious ...

We walk to the edge of the continent / and there in the sand I turn to her and say, / look,
this is where I buried myself 

So on this X-mas eve. There I was. Sitting in the basement. On an old blue sectional couch. Alone

 Most nights we stayed behind, Tweety Bird / pajama shirts stretched over our knees, waist-length hair soaking / our backs as we sat on the floor and thumbed glossy 10mm prints.

They sat on the grassy bank, clothes clinging to their wet bodies, watching the river flow. A few raindrops splashed on the surface, tiny dimples rushed away downstream. Neither of them bothered to point out that it was going to rain.

I stopped drawing stars on my student’s papers. Stars are dying suns shouting out “goodbye!” as they disappear. Why should that signify goodness?

I discovered distant Facebook friends—dead from

Confessions don’t make good stories. 

 It doesn't take much for a curve to become a coil, for a bridge to become a cage.

I’m going out
to snag a man. 

I was at a party for the end of the world. I came so I wouldn’t be alone. I guess so did all the other women. They must have known there’d be no men at this party because they wore beautiful

my parents taught me to say ‘surrender’
in a dozen foreign languages.

We were listening to the bombing over the radio while my mother drove me to confirmation class that night.  The radio said We as if America was a bunch of siblings who once shared a bed together.

I could take my hands off. Just unlock them at the wrists, snap them off like the heads of artificial flowers. As long as my mouth’s working him, up down up down, he wouldn’t notice if I had no

That winter my mother takes me to her country, a little place on the equator I had not yet seen.

the night of the attack

mother did you hear them
they had tongues like lightning
and forked through the forest
shooting the heads off sparrows.

mother did you see their
bonfires

The man keeps thinking about the power lines—the ones that are strung over his house.

Sometimes at night, he can hear them up there, buzzing.

It's hard to sleep with all the

I don't like most people. And have been jealous of Bud for ages. With reason.

Subtraction, division,

rabbit bones, rabbit lives

They never seemed to notice me, not even when I rolled up my uniform skirt, like the other girls did, and walked the stairs in front of them.