family

Lessons I’ve Learned From a Woodpecker: Save your brain Get to work Be loving Be free I had a few concussions when I was younger. I feel like we are…

* * * my sixteenth year spreads itself between steam flooding under a locked door & my mother knocking softly. a juicy lucy burger waits in my stomach & i’m…

Image Credit: Engin Akyurt from Pexels   Entangled in sleep, Omar lay across the porch in front of the door like a sack of laundry. I nudged him softly with…

I never knew my lola. Every few months, I would hear her voice crackle through the phone from the other side of the Earth.  On the mantel, I would see…

I.   They had all disappeared before I arrived. Death. Distance. Disconnection. And discontent. Mother said her mum jubilated when she conceived me. But earth had taken her in, folding…

Dear Uncle R., Here’s what the stories have told me: you died in 1987 at home, not in Vietnam. I was born in 1990. My coworker—an army reserve who saw…

My grandmother died the day I went to the dentist. My dad called me right as I was putting on some coffee. In three days, I was sitting in an…

If I could start at the beginning, I would start with the blanket: blue with white polka dots. Or was it pink, with the edges so tattered you could stick…

Image Credit: Jesse Shofner   Last winter, your father asked if “queer” was still a slur. He asked this carefully, as he always does when it comes to your sexuality.…

I am thinking about birds a lot. I come from a “bird family.” While my mother has owned fish, mice, hamsters, a goat, turtles and dogs—for many years her best…

The family lore is repeated over and over. It becomes so familiar memory mixes with imagination to fill in the spaces. My sister, Maria, loved too much. Here lies Mr.…

Image Credit: Carsten Lenz   There are four tunnels on the drive between the house I grew up in and the house I live in now. Four hours of black…

Image Credit: Kosoluchi Agboanike   1.   Where I am from, a boy is taught to trace his history beginning from his father’s loins. He is to secure a rope around…

image courtesy of Cori Bratby-Rudd   1. I used to cry, chose to sleep on the floor, sleepingbagged child with a dog, a mom and with with with a sickening…