The day Yumi got her eighth piercing—a semicolon on her left eyebrow—her mother pulled her into the kitchen and gave her an ultimatum.
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He used to see his daughter, Maya, each Saturday. Her mother would drive her to his condo early in the morning, and he would have to be awake because the doorbell never woke him.
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Here is the father and here is the son and here is the midnight emergency room. If there was a mother she would be here too, but there is no mother, not anymore, just the father with the liminal-spacy eyes and the boy with the fluorescent mouth, a fractured glowstick dangling on a string around his neck.
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Two giant men came in and asked for quarts of strawberry. My hands were split from constant washing, from the soaped rag I used to wipe down counters. I opened the freezer.
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My heart is the small brown rabbit. We can recognize it from the other rabbits by the way it shivers, which I imagine is an indication of my anxiety. The hutch is large and made entirely of glass. The rabbits hop back and forth. They stare, unblinking.
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Carrie has your left breast clenched in her hands. You want to ask her to be gentler, but how much more vulnerable can she expect you to be?
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to sanctify our spaghetti with this many ungodly packets of sugar, dressing our noodles in a wet bed of banana ketchup, Eden cheese, and hot dog chunks that we watch you slurp in the backseat at 6am, because breakfast is God, and you will never have a meal so generous.
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Bernadette’s husband stands over a mound of dark, wet dirt. In one hand, a trowel, in the other, a weathered copy of Gardening West of the Cascades they had found at the bins last winter. It’s bloated with water, the plastic edge of the cover curling away from the paper backing.
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When we first started cohabitating, all our spinach would wilt. We both would buy separate bags on our separate Sunday supermarket runs. By month three, we made shopping a shared activity.
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I grew up in Vermont, but now I live in California, and I only ever return home to visit my mom. A red blood cell pumped back to the heart. Each time I return, her house shrinks.
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