the german’s heart. the local stoner’s heart. derek’s heart. so so many hearts. all stolen and trashed like fast food wrappers out a speeding car window. where are the keys to lock me up?

Isn’t that what we all want? Someone to come alongside us? Someone to fill the empty spaces in our stories? If we pay attention, our most vulnerable fellow humans are teaching us how to bear witness, how to join, how to show up.

or times when my sister would pretend we were french for who in their right mind wouldn’t want to be more neapolitan than the chocolate bottom on a triple-layer ice-cream stack

Is it possible my life story is entwined with his? That there is no coincidence? Might there be some form of "atonement" among various members of my family for this past? I expand my family history research. Could I or my relatives be making amends or reparations through "good works"?

I’ve told my therapist I will stop referring to myself as a series of holes, but still, it happens. He doesn’t laugh, only watches me with a mixture of pity and trepidation as I bray at his video icon on the skype call. It’s not hurtful if you laugh at yourself. It’s not sad. Look at how I’m laughing. See how much fun I’m having, talking this way.

It flips the pages until my cowering shadow bends and shifts in a slow motion cartoon moving from month to month until I am left in a knotted mess of sheets, missed calls and black out curtains.

But my grandmother did not outlive us all. In fact, she died when I was twelve, around the same time my sister left, and I don’t know if it was from one of her self-diagnosed maladies but there you have it – she was afraid of dying and, boom, she was dead. Which proved something. And I began to be afraid too.

Mother, I am wasting your life and want to give it back to you, but I’m not sure how.

Dear Jesus. Please help Brian quit heroin for good this time. I look to the crucifix for a sign but Jesus just hangs there. His painted eyes are fixed on Brian, who thrashes, shakes, and grips his sweat-drenched sheet. Amen.

12. “The Only Thing,” by Sufjan Stevens - Do I care if I survive this burying of the dead? Should I tear my eyes out before I see too much? I can’t save you from sorrow.

It's difficult to be close to someone you don’t know. And it’s difficult to know someone who doesn’t reveal who they are and what matters most to them. I didn’t realize as a teenager that understanding my mother would be a lifelong process. Perhaps she didn’t reveal herself because she did not truly know who she was, or perhaps she worried about being rejected. I was never sure.

I can’t find my oxygen at the bottom of a bottle but I can find the peaceful apathy. The kind you find at the bottom of a lake when the panic subsides and you stop trying to swim.

As the emotion grew (and maybe it was simply literary projection), so too grew a fear of love. At an age where kids were meanest to themselves, to admit openly not only that you loved someone, but another boy, carried with it a heavy stigma. What would I do if I ever faced Tommy’s look of disgust? Maybe I shouldn’t tell him. At least not in the seventh grade.

Other dogs lope by, don’t hear barks from my house. I donated unused vet pills. The leash coils in a drawer. My hurt feels like howling.

Those of us in the last chapter of our lives know there are many things we may not get to do. Nonetheless, there is much we can do and, more to the point, do better. The word never implies finality. Never implies impossibility, another word I despise. Never suggests defeat, bordering on despair. It’s an awful word.

But we made sure her flowers were safe that we / Tucked them under our chests til the house harbored / Their limbs that we’d never let the ice pelt them that / Her flowers had tasted the cool rain but no more

Before you hurt me, I had so much beauty. Before I knew any better, everything tasted sweet. I was a child, after all, even bitter vegetables are fun to push around a plate.

America. We. Love. You. So. Much. / land of the free and home of the grave / Where an issue of Kleenex Monthly / and flowers / are delivered every / National Disability Independence Day / by motorcade / in stacked cartons / labelled only “THE LONELY”

Many people have an invisible disability. In the United States, the number ranges from one in two, to 26 million. We don’t use wheelchairs. We are not always housebound. We look perfectly fine. Talking with friends who have the same diagnosis, I learned that not only do symptoms come and go, they are different for everyone. No wonder the physicians are baffled.

your mudtropic soul still drawn / just as the boy of you imagined / never to resist not under glaring sun nor beneath / the halo of the moon / rolling with that sister down an embankment / into a ditchful of daylilies