Author: Contributor

You taught me how to look down upon children. Folding your hands, you refused to teach me how to break a length of thread with my teeth, or how to hold back tears when I pricked my fingers on needle tips. You were the one that taught me not to run barefoot through grass, and…

Mom fell off the porch when she was pregnant with me. Dad told me this when I was four, and Dad isn’t around anymore to answer my questions, so I can’t ask them. I like to imagine that it was the Fourth of July, and she and Dad were lighting sparklers because she loved him…

My father’s hands are big and rough; his fingers thick; his nails, cut at the kitchen table on Saturday mornings, straight-edged and blunt.  They are never quiet, always moving, always fixing and holding and typing.  Today they pick at the scaly brown skin of a lychee, peeling it away to reveal the soft white flesh…

I stand with Grandmother, rinse a dish with warm milk, watch yeast froth. She cups flour in her palms, presses it into her cuts. Claims it clots the blood. My father opens the door, throws a sack of mahlab to the counter, a bible at my back. It breaks skin. Consider the mahaleb cherry: thin…

I was a late bloomer, Aunt Nina always said, not like my mother who bled for the first time the day she turned nine. But like my mother, when I bloomed I did so violently – breasts heavy as stars, hips that curved from my waist like the prow of an ancient warship, and that…

I I threw out my mother’s stuffed rabbit. The one she developed an attachment to after she saw it on a wooden shelf in our country cottage, after realizing we had left it there all winter long. I remember when she saw it, slid its floppy body off the shelf and began brushing its fur…

1. Here is a rose or something like one 2. Here is a cathedral and when she screams it loosens the screws in the next house 3. Here is a note smooth as vowels and when sung it makes out like church bells Proof of non-inhabitants 4. Here is a crime inside a sentence sentenced…