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He’ll probably try to get her in the sack, just to stay in practice.

Every dawn you’d toss the feed, your hands faithful to the good work of rising.

I had to prepare. I had to be able to save us from what was coming.

If your father were here, he wouldn’t put up with your insolence.

The moment in your drunk when you become rich! A connoisseur.

“For the entire time I was there I couldn’t get that out of my head.”

In the rooms you picked up what you liked, like shells on a beach.

We chose to stay in the brutality of that night, even as the girls walked away.

The first time the world demanded more of me, I was twenty-nine.

It takes a strong woman to make any sort of success in the West.

Ma didn’t believe in slapping. It was what common people did.

Love cannot override what cells do in the nighttime of our bodies.

I hold on to the shape of a star the way my aunts hold on to Jesus’s gown.

After nearly a year of dating, I never stopped thinking of that other boy.

He was warm that way, always tender, and maybe that’s the worst part.

He glowered even as a little child. Maybe because he has your bad eyes.

He was trying to seduce me with his history, which was mine as well.

Surely a million mothers and school teachers can’t be entirely wrong.

Never mind the gossip of the world. Don’t have it, yet have it!

She wonders if he will be all right. She assumes he has four-wheel drive.

Somebody would be a lot happier if she were more like her mother.

Spanish men. They whispered and whistled. It made her jumpy.

I crouched just like my mother burying nail clippings to ward off curses.

My mother and I remained apart. My father came late to the party.

This is the woman who had shrunk so small, nobody could find her.

She asked, “What’s the weirdest thing you can do with your body?”

His mother wasn’t there to meet him at his stop. She never was.

And that girls came to his house all the time, cheap girls from the docks.

She looks down the street for Scott’s truck. He’s late but so is she.

Her family was still poor and hungry and scared.