In my dream she is a baby still, cradled in my arms, sheltered from any harm that might come her way. As I hold her, she looks up at me, and I can see she feels the depth of my love— never wavering, ever constant. But in reality, she is twenty now and has left […]
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Your mother is not always the person who brought you into this world. Maybe she adopted you a few years in, or maybe she married your father after you were born. A mother is not defined as who gave birth to you but rather who has nurtured you like a parent should since the moment she […]
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Mothers anticipate the bittersweet, but when I opened my throat, she shut my mouth. Children are so wild. Stuffed it with cloth. Then, she sent it home. Branch-broken, run wild, cry into the night. Sometimes wolves would answer. I slept in a burnt-out hutch, learning a witch’s charred secrets. I yipped their philosophy at the […]
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The day my mother first fell asleep, it began to rain. It lashed heavily against the French windows, the mulberry trees in the yard almost screaming with terror as the wind whipped them ungracefully around and the old swing and dead flowers fell under the weight of water. As she sunk, languid and tired, into […]
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My daughter recently had a birthday, but I couldn’t tell you how old she is. Here’s what I can tell you. When she was ten I told my daughter that she was never something I could want. She was not something planned or expected or desirable, and when she was born I took one look […]
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You are the horrid moon that seeks to wreak havoc inside me, with a rope you pull me to you, and I let you, and I leap high and higher and higher, always assured that I’m about to reach you, but you’re only close enough to make me dance to your tune, far enough to […]
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from the perspective of your daughter, twelve years from now I was Daddy’s girl until I found out that Daddy had another girl and another girl and another girl and he rotated through them like revolving doors in the winter. I was Daddy’s girl but then Daddy started sleeping with someone half his age. I […]
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When they asked Lucy’s father what word he would use to describe Lucy, he said “phantasmagorical.” He had trouble pronouncing the word, so it came out jumbled, messy, and illiterate, which ironically perfectly suited his thoughts on Lucy. He loved her, yes; he’d seen galaxies when he’d held her for the first time in that […]
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It was raining the first time I left my body. Mom left the house to be one with the storm. Her shirt was still stained with hot tea when she left, and the floor behind me was still covered in broken glass pieces. Mom had been far away from here again, yelling about Missed Opportunities […]
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