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Distractions

Reading at work, listening to music during labor, swatting gnats while meditating

The Empty Room Inside Each of Us

Crumb is always right, always the one telling the story, always the one who turns the drab, lonesome plains they call home into a world that’s dramatic and necessary.

Our Fraying Hearts

I have a sense of the drama people want to hear about, but most days our ER is filled with abdominal pain and vomiting—nothing like what you’re accustomed to seeing on TV.

Sunbeams

God and the Doctor we alike adore / But only when in danger, not before; / The danger o’er, both are alike requited, / God is forgotten, and the Doctor slighted.

John Owen

Practicing

Taking piano lessons, learning to speak Russian, seeking enlightenment

Bars

On a playground, at a gymnastics meet, over an apartment window

The Coast of Nowhere II

Sleet and black rain / pelting the eaves, the kind of predawn / that reaches through the window, hissing, / Your heart never was a bird let alone / a bright-red singing one.

A Conversation with My Father

You could make things up that actually felt more like truth, somehow. You could build a world so precise that other people started to believe it, too. And if you didn’t believe the things my dad said, he’d find a way to make you.