I’m music stand and mud,

littered with the plastic lips

of a late-night celebration.

My mother’s iron was heavy, with a speckled cord and stubby plug. In the cellar, she and I pressed my father’s shirts. He worked a desk job he’d never dreamed of growing up in a South End tenement, working a machine in a nearby raincoat factory and letting it all proceed from there.

When Harry says hello, he means for now. He means let’s see how the evening goes. He means he might or might not have something else come up and he will have to leave. 

I wonder who it’s for? I’ve always hated oranges. I used to watch my aunt peel them over her speckled brown ash tray, the Virginia Slims slowly buried in citrus.

Knotted willows eye

a ladybug soliloquizing

atop fence post ledges,

The first time you fuck is on a Saturday night turned Sunday morning. After his face finally re-emerges from the back of your thighs, he asks, am I going to catch something from this?

Q: In some of Dear Memory’s sections, there are quotations by other writers that your writing responds to. What’s your process for collecting these ideas or quotes?

A: Honestly, I am disorganized. Sometimes I'd just open random books around me and see something and it might spur something in my mind or I would slot it into the text I was working on.

The guest bedroom is the only room in our home my mom doesn’t cover with wallpaper when she marries. Assuming this door will almost always stay closed, she sees no need.

Behind the basement stairs was a box of swaddling blankets I know we tossed last summer. I threw them out.

I sit on them now cradling my foot like a broken child.