Phoebe, having finished her stockings, started on her husband’s shirts and then, with Rose, tackled the vegetable garden while Rose told her stories about her brother’s exploits at Salamanca, which sounded like a lark, at least in her telling. Phoebe held the wholly unfounded belief that she might have made a good soldier, which she voiced as she pulled a doll-sized radish out of the earth and shook it firmly. Laughing, Rose shielded herself from the spray of dirt.

wǒmen—or to say—we

are waiting by the sea, & i watch

my mother confess to receding

shorelines. there is only plurality

in her stories, only wǒmen, only

because that’s all i wanted to be.

a girl left nameless—rendered whole

& baptized in all things holy.

please. this is a eulogy for girls

born untitled. we can be more than the syllables

clenched between yellowing teeth.

How do you come back normal

from Deliverance Day

Milo: …women so beautiful they don’t seem like they exist.

Father Rogers: It only seems that way because you’re young. (cigarette) Or actually—you’ll stop caring eventually. Time has a way of levelling it all out.

(speaking on Naya)

Milo: It’s the voice that goes before the laugh. I’m thinking of getting myself hypnotized because she’s still there completely if I have a dream or something. It’s not my fault, the impression, you know, the somatic thing…starts to fade. It’s a defense mechanism. It’s time…

Rogers: Leveling it all out, taking care of it all…

Milo: I don’t want that—like this. (beat)

Marina woke to hushed conversations from the kitchen. Three voices, including Lee's, all low and serious.

Marina and Lee had lived apart now for six months, she and the girls here in Irving, Lee renting an apartment twenty minutes away in Dallas. He said he had good work there, though never offered specifics. Only on weekends did he stay with them. At first, the arrangement embarrassed her; they'd been married just two years. But she quickly came to appreciate the space it gave her from his increasingly frequent rants and demands.

With fond sentiment

I recall with selective detail

One dimly lit

Night, outside some bottle store

When for the first time I

Felt something different because you

There have been plenty of times when I had to fight for my life.

Sometimes it was for my “health and safety”,

sometimes for happiness.

I fought for what I could not bear to lose,

but I lost all the same. I can still recall the taste of all

those defeats, as bitter as unripe plums.

His hands smell of anemone and mushrooms

on a spring morning.

The sea is flat as he is silent.

He’s a man who deals with silence and water, with

the weight of the stones in his pockets.