My mother's hands on her birthday.

Co-owners of my lonely heart.

Subtly is everything.

Made in Virginia.

Don't touch anything, she said. In case they can gather evidence.

Training her up in the way she should go.

My Socrates.

"I had lived my life/from small relief to small relief, like a boy pulling a thorn/from his foot." ~from Richie Hofmann's "After" (Ploughshares, winter '13-14)

Reading across a sopping wet interstate in Alabama with gas station coffee.

My grandmother's cookie recipe with her namesakes, my sister & my daughter.

The best lessons in creativity come from absorbing another. How my dad opens wine bottles.

I wanted to catch him, before the chemo. Instead, I caught her, beat-keeping on a beer bottle by the bonfire.