I came down to Blues Alley tonight, where they serve things like steak and potatoes, and bread and butter. The menu is intentionally hearty, as if to tell us that this is the kind of relief a night here is supposed to provide. I’m not sure what it is I’m searching for relief from, but I did wake up this morning drenched in sweat, and with a sore chest to boot, as if a little gremlin had been out there overnight dancing from muscle fiber to muscle fiber while trying to rid me of a troubling …

Can I turn the canyon into a trampoline? I would say this is every writer’s quest, but Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf did not face an invisible amphitheater of internet editors.  I envy my weird sisters of old, writing for joy and survival. They writhed with humid words. They were offered no shade from a masthead. They lacked the green visors of style guides. Out under the awning, they were driven to prophecy. Publication was a dandelion on a far continent.  If their words …

God, if there's anything entering this piece, let it be a breeze not another flood. No one gives news about a war without splashing blood on faces, without digging a hollow, without an arrow or a sword inside hearts. Tell me the best way to sing a dirge. Or the best way to pronounce someone's death. There is nothing like he died while sleeping, emptiness had already filled the body, and a well is already dug inside the relatives. Everyday, we count dead ones like grains—if it is not an …

My teen is learning another language. Nouns only get him so far. Round verbs clash with square pronouns. Roles befuddle fluency. We joke, we sing. Mom (loud) and kid (embarrassed). We pick up cuss words, gingerly, like dropped fruit (bruised but still good). Months of drudgery, then he drafts paragraphs about a family tree, and the apple does not fall all that far from the trunk. *** I quit shaving my legs when the kids were little. It just happened, slowly, during blustery seasons …

I walk our high school track under the noonday sun as young Carter the Punter goes about his ritual in the end zone 75 yards away. I work where Carter is a student and venture outside whenever possible, the mountain air has a way of breaking my fatigue. Carter talks to himself as he stretches; his voice resembles a muppet and carries well. In good and ill-tempered weather, he will be here with his duffle bag of tools: a small pump, ten footballs, exercise bands, two pairs of cleats, and a …

iii. When we arrived, my mother was already dead. The smell was antiseptic and my senses were overwhelmed by the acrid and the fluorescent, the sound of sneaker friction against worn floors, the collaborative din of life-supporting machines. I carried a box of new ballet slippers, tokens to carry me into summer camp. She was covered by a thin white sheet, face turned toward us, hollow human shell without the mother force thrumming things along. iii./v. The look of death is shared. Our unique …