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Parenting
Teaching My Daughter To Walk
If my daughter had been born to the Ashanti people in Ghana, she would have been abandoned at the riverbank.
January 2014
Arcadia
But there’s a force that pulls with quiet, steady gravity; a single force that doesn’t go away, no matter where I am or what I’m doing. It seems primordial. I suspect it has something to do with love. Or that it is, precisely, love. Whatever name one wants to give it, it is the force that trumps all else, the force that causes me to wish to be right here, just as I am, forever, watching my daughter as she makes another valentine.
December 2013
A Brief For The Defense
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies / are not starving someplace, they are starving / somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils. / But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants. / Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not / be made so fine.
— from “A Brief for the Defense”
July 2013Breaking The Rules
A dime for the pay phone, a $9.61 fine for a social-studies book, a parking ticket
July 2013
What I Didn’t Do
I never called her back, the woman / with the two babies born just like mine: / girls who couldn’t crawl or talk, / could barely smile, who lay there, / bundled in flowered dresses, staring / at the ceiling.
June 2013Heat Of Departure
Ninety degrees of thick, rude heat — a summer guest / we can’t get rid of — hovering over our city, / our brick house. Yet our son, who’s leaving home / tomorrow, we wish would stay.
June 2013
Blueberries
Basia watches her granddaughter, Lalka. No matter what else she does — digs in the garden, pulls weeds in the greenhouse, peels the potatoes — always she watches her granddaughter, who has a reddish-purple birthmark over her neck and jaw and part of her cheek. Her husband, Zbigniew, watches Lalka too.
April 2013
Punch
In my family, as in many families, there is a moment we all remember but never speak about. It’s the moment in which my oldest brother went around the dining-room table and smashed every dinner plate, then tried to punch our father, who punched his firstborn son in the face.
March 2013
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