Your cousins, a few friends line up in the pew. Your brother— absent. He stole from you, lied that you locked your cupboards to starve him, tried to con…

  The lamp that flickered, your keyring, my daughter’s childish portrait, a watercolor rose.   I listed aloud the room’s familiar items like a ship’s manifest   to soothe you,…

  You brought rifles, knives, katana, bow and arrows to the house, as if still hunkered down in your Brooklyn apartment, still pommeled by friendly fire, your mother’s drinking. Like…

  The morning glories I saw less than a month ago can’t be flowering now, more snow than expected yesterday,   and several nights of heavy frost the past few…

  We were kids in school together, though not friends or playmates, just in the same class, and now, decades later, he jacks deer, travels the roads in his pickup…

  a box of frogs arrived one day at our front door, special delivery? My dad had ordered them. Laboratory frogs, he called them. Said they were ours; we could…

  My father’s childhood home was condemned a few years before. Looking at the simple house, above us on the slight hill, I wanted to enter, except my tía stopped…

  I find disappointment in the Midwest—how they keep wanting me to be Mothman. We both wear red eyes and wings, but I take no joy in knocking down bridges…

  Inside the mask, hot with my own breath and the toxic smell of cheap rubber, I look through eye-holes into the mirror and see a predictably demented clown.  …

  I get it. There is nothing inherently creepy about an empty swing swinging on an abandoned playground. But the ghost pushing it is a problem. You remind of my…