My second relationship looked something like this: spun from what was left in the kitchen each night, all fish and sinnew. He had the largest hands, butcher-palms, blood under the nails, and his teeth were white scarecrows after too many fights. The salt-blue...

  First, the front door. A series of pots and pans without a permanent place. The wind, the rain. A childhood photo with a boy in an over-sized suit. Only the eyes are the same. They look at me and say I could have loved him even then. Accountability & stars....

  When I was young, I gazed at a tree and knew if I didn’t start climbing, I’d never get another chance. My smaller body was in a red and black dress, white tights that snagged on the branches. By the time the adults took notice, my feet were above their heads,...

  is a candlestick, snapped at the base after being dropped from a bag of date-night accessories. We had a terrible anniversary. Two weeks later, we met in the bedroom, and our bodies were sad---sad fingers slipped through sad hair, sad lips touched sad mouths....

 ...

  The low, chuffing calls of deer in the bog are like a man grinding his teeth, steadily into the face of a megaphone. The call of birds. A conversation, the garble. The suction and pop of a leg pulling up from the bog’s thick mouth. Upon close examination,...

  One afternoon I mistook a young swan, dipping his head, for a large turtle rolling over and over---water, sun, water, sun---and the sadness returned. My stomach, seeming at a distance, filled. I wonder now if this is how a mother feels when she loses a child, a...

  At the restaurant, the ceiling tiles were white and sagging, weak-in-the-knees, Casablanca lilies. This was a place that should have taken him back to his childhood. A place for burial, a cremation. They arrived with a variety of meats, d’oeuvres, all the way...