our daughter isn’t well my mother says to him, as if each part of the phrase wasn’t a separate cutting, because let’s parse this, i haven’t been their daughter…

    “The dead are having a party without us. They’ve left our worries behind . . .” —Kathleen Aguero, from “Send Off”   Kerry was using again the last…

  The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit.…

  The Black River ripples up from the limestone beneath the Ozark Mountains. Standing in its shallows, watching small fry dash and school just beyond the ripples of my steps,…

  Pinning As a child I was terrified of bugs, so I made illustrated catalogs of them. Encounters with real insects meant tears and fits, yet I forced myself to…

  Who’s to say what prompted this. Who’s to say if this display of bodily might, this performance of scorned womanhood, is justified, justifying some wrongdoing, some emotion repressed. The…

  A few years ago there suddenly appeared a bird’s nest in the hydrangea outside my front door. A little miracle, assembled almost overnight, it had speckled blue eggs within.…

  One morning in the spring when I was seven years old, I woke up a puffy pink monster. My lips had disappeared into a mass of swollen flesh, my…

  On the high shelves of my father’s salvage store in Provincetown, I sometimes spotted a glimmer of blue among his dusty collections of clam rakes, lanterns, chains, and anchors;…

  My father saved his teeth by lying through them. Somewhere on the border between Russia and Poland, pines and rifles, in the nineteen-teens, he went off to the woods…

  Last October I spent some time on the Greek island of Andros, two hours east by ferry from the mainland. It seemed the right place to re-immerse myself in…