The soft pink lining of my cheeks, the ridges along the roof of my mouth, the recesses of my throat: the year before I turned thirty, they all betrayed…

  The best guess, says the seed package, is that the name for this fabulous lettuce, Drunken Women, derives from her frizzy-headed look—emerald leaves tipped in dark claret red. A…

  It was a surprise, really, that we both wanted them—the twin ceramic dogs that live on top of the china cabinet. Will and I have inherited many things between…

  I grew up expecting them, dreading them, that appointed hour in biology class when the dead—or worse—the still-alive-and-only-just-anesthetized frogs would be presented to us for dissection. I pictured the…

  Your father’s tufted rocking chair ruled the living room corner in his absence, gathering dust motes and Marlboro ash. If you insisted, it would rock with a groan that…

  I’m trying to date you. You’re late. Or I’m late. Our timing is already off. We met online. OkCupid or Plenty of Fish. My pictures are a decade old.…

  If men had wings, we would hear nothing but their beating. Some would learn how to tune out the takeoffs, while others would start their day by donning a…

  i. Moss creeps up the massive white oak, gentling its craggy bark. This centenarian protects our farmhouse from summer’s glare. A black snake once lived beneath its gnarliest root,…

  Lush, 144 Newbury St., Boston, MA When I heard the bombs go off, I was standing in this shop with a tiny box of their “solid toothpaste” in my…

  When we drive through Salt River Canyon on US 60, the highway connecting the Tucson desert to the pine-forested mountains of our childhoods, I ask my husband to pull…

  Much later, when I was twenty-eight years old, I met up with our childhood friends at a bar in our Connecticut hometown the night before your funeral and they…

  oil on canvas   Mira que si te quise, fué por el pelo, Ahora que estás pelona, ya no te quiero. Look, if I loved you, it was for…