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…

  mixed media on canvas   [i didn’t know he had a sister is the wrong thought. nonetheless it comes to me. so does the husband, ferried by the double…

  The bus is a bull—pausing, lurching, exploding, charging, bucking, buckling. Ride the bus. Ride the bull. Ride the wave. Every seat is taken, even the ones that face each…

  Shortly after college, I bought The Visible Woman for fifteen dollars from a little yellow antique store in my hometown. I’ve carried her with me for years. The name…

  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.…