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The Nile will teem with frogs. They will come up into your palace and your bedroom and onto your bed…and into your ovens and kneading troughs. —EXODUS 8:3   When, as punishment, my father made me read the Book of Exodus, he never offered explanation. The lesson, perhaps, was: Fathers should speak to their sons…

on the front steps of some young professional’s apartment in Boston.                     She smokes I hold my breath it is hard for both of us to breathe. Her: heavy doses of meds Me: small doses of meds meant to make seeing her less painful, other things less crushing.                     Today it is hot she tries to blow…

The window is a world, the trees continents, complicated, crowding the blue and hazy shore and that house, that house over there, my mistakes come to rest in the landscape. How did they find me, invisible, behind glass? How did they become so solid, so fixed and neighborly, more vigilant each day, looking out for…

I buried my girlhood in the garden where nothing grows, at the bottom of the river that runs through it. I buried   the hair ribbons and skirts with shorts sewn underneath, buried the blow-up pool and flamingo floaties, the plush lamb   tied to a string. My girlhood, sunburned with skinned knees, leaving wet…

I will always remember Pythagoras because of you. An artist not a scholar, carpenter,  or for that matter a teacher at all— even in grade eight we understood you taught a2 + b2 = c2  for three straight months  because it was the only math you knew  and our regular teacher with his  re-heated coffees…

For a decade, I smoked a pack a day. It wasn’t the drug I craved but pure, gleaming abandon. At sixteen, I bent a car around a tree and loved the moment when I slipped headfirst from the webbed glass into a pool of streetlight, a puddle of my own blood. Sliding from the wreck…

Which weight did I know and which did I fail to carry? And what does one red cardinal weigh atop a wooden fence? In front of the yellow siding? The weight of. Please spare me what a man might own, what he might lift overhead, hoist once.   Before his bones grow hollow, his mind…

In the house made of guns in the city made of guns on the street lit with lead,   my father sits building a new room. This is to be my room, with a scope   for a window, the crosshairs of white wood across the glass   framing the yard with the hollowed-out pine…

It was despite, or because of the rain. It was because of the hot summer night, heavy and wet like roof insulation left out in unwrapped stacks at the cottage that never got finished. It was because it was too hot to breathe, and jumping in the lake was the only relief. It was because…