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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...