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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.

Think how you move, how a room changes with your smallest breath.

A memory in the drip, drip, drip of the kitchen sink that won’t stop.

My mother is queen of buttons. She shows off the prized ones.

A goddess was offended; her altar required my virgin blood.

I wanted my love to be everywhere, then love began to bite through me.

I tell my sister what I didn’t tell my father, I love you. Please, don’t die.

Writing to you is like putting a note in a bottle, hoping it will reach Japan.

I should call my loves while I can to listen to the grackles croak.

He has his hands on Nii’s throat, and this time I do not stop them.

The laughter rises like the roar of a train as the men leap to their feet.

It seemed to her that they only ever touched each other in transient, sudden ways.

There lay before us a bag that gave forth, at a touch, the jingle of gold.

One of us broke away, cooled, and died, having never fully lived.

“I can’t believe she’s drinking,” she said. “I just can’t believe it.”

The coverage of the state funeral, black horse bearing an empty saddle.

What’s left is a thumbhouse, an inch of gristle inside skin walls.

A homecoming, she says, as if you hadn’t been back in decades.

Dan Gerber reads poems of boyhood, and from the end of his mother’s life.

After you have read all you possibly can there may be a few lines left.