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Mothersexpand_moreBrassy bullets fell against the floral comforter like little candies.
Maybe older Natives have more trauma than younger ones.
The new generation doesn’t play war, which is a shame; they text.
By the end of my trip to St. Thomas, I had discovered a reason to live.
When I was born I saw death devour the birth of something.
When we move together in the dark I can almost get to him but I turn back.
Her body too, a mystery in motion. But does she own her body?
I measured your breath with my breath, your foot with my thumb.
Peter Taylor’s stories are jigsaw puzzles of nuance and suggestion.
It seemed that someone had died, but really it was part of us.
A week later, I said to a friend: I don’t think I could ever write about it.
I love you to distraction, she would say. I love you beyond love.
This is the worst moment of her life, maybe of anybody’s life, ever.
The only person I’d seen naked was my mother the night she died.
Like a god I shook their tiny worlds, terrible but ineffectual storms.
He hadn’t meant to hurt her. Drowning people will do anything for air.
The clearest memory was when his father shot a grizzly.
Now I’m no longer the buzzards glooming over the mango tree.
My ups and downs never stop on the hump we call a hill behind the house.
We’re all trying, in our own ways, to parse what we may have done wrong.
Their days go over in idleness, and they sigh if the wind but lift a tress.
This summer I mothered my brother’s death; I brothered my mother’s cancer. My brother and mother died this summer, two of seven billion.
Her skin was bruised under her eyes, purple like the swollen toe.
Maybe all of it was possible. Maybe it all could work out.
You remind me of lizards birthed in an outhouse by an ogre or a loon.
“Mind you come straight home,” Mrs. Heywood always says.
Up there there’s not a sound except for the wind and the buzzing of bees.
The horror of the waste appalls me. This beauty. This habitation of dream.
Cassandra blared Puccini and Eminem so she would not pray.
A man jostles my stride to the street, no shoulder on which to move.