Balsam

Balsam

    When I overheard my father say the words master baiter, I thought it must be the ultimate fishing lure. I practiced writing this new phrase in a spiral notebook, never once trying to spell bait like ate or eight. My father’s only magazine subscription was for Outdoor Life, and by the time I...
Bus Stop

Bus Stop

  Bus horns wake you, alone in bed with the kids — you drove up for his conference, you knew he’d be gone all day — last night he said “All of Chicago is your playground,” while you fussed about the room searching for bus fare, your head drowning with worry: ‘What if we don’t...
Walking with the Widows

Walking with the Widows

There is a bluebird on the limb of a tree in a yard near a house that is painted fairy-tale yellow. Like a piece of the sky with a rise of dawn on its chest and a fiesta necklace. I’ve walked these streets for twenty-seven years, and I’ve never seen a bluebird. Not here. Then...
Decade

Decade

I sit on the pool’s edge and watch my daughter swim. She dives underwater then surfaces beside me. “Momma,” she says, “I was trying to see how long I could hold my breath…what it would be like to drown but couldn’t. I popped up for air.” I kiss the top of her swim cap. “Your...
Welcome to the Grotto

Welcome to the Grotto

We drive to Dickeyville in search of Jesus and find him entombed behind glass. My seven-year-old daughter Ellie marvels at the mystery. Of all the places Jesus might’ve called home, how did he choose a small town somewhere in southwestern Wisconsin? Welcome to the Grotto, a sign reads, Gift Shop in Back. We exit the...
Poetry In the Margins

Poetry In the Margins

Whoever read this book before me has left their mark—in pale blue ink, a tiny print I struggle to decipher, curious about how they made sense of these poems I often cannot make sense of. I have penned a few black question marks beside passages that confounded me,an enthusiastic yes here and there, but a...
Mothers’ Top Dresser Drawers

Mothers’ Top Dresser Drawers

To rummage there was to be let in on a secret. You whispered. You tiptoed. Among the satin, lace, and letters of my mother’s was a string of pearls I let trickle across my palm. It had clung to the collarbone of her grandmother, my great-grandmother, Anna B, the one who claimed to be born...
The Reincarnation of the Absent Father

The Reincarnation of the Absent Father

“Oh, hi,” I said, holding my newborn son for the first time. I took in his translucent skin, red fuzz, bright baby blues, and…didn’t recognize him. “Who are you?” It hadn’t been like that with my daughter. She’d had the look of my husband at birth so completely that I could only laugh at her...
How I Would Use Time Travel

How I Would Use Time Travel

Tonight I stared full into the eyes of my infant son while I fed him a bottle. Whether from contentedness or exhaustion, his eyes did not, as they often do, flit across the room, discovering everything in the usual infant way, but stayed fixed upon mine. His eyes are livid, tending toward thundercloud gray in...
This Is the Room Where

This Is the Room Where

I keep my keys; where I can watch the guy across the street mow his lawn shirtless; where I learned my niece was having her fourth child; where you can find Gary’s dogeared, underlined, and deeply annotated copy of “The Federalist No. 10,” written by James Madison on November 22, 1787; where I watch Real...
A Small Consolation

A Small Consolation

“Don’t hold your breath, baby. You’ll turn blue,” my mother always said. But my five-year-old daughter inhales. She holds her breath until her skin flushes, her eyes bulge, until I stop clipping her nails. “Okay, okay.” I drop the clippers on the dining room table, zip up her coat, slide the straps of her backpack...
The Dresser

The Dresser

“Look what he’s done.” My grandmother—Greggie—tried to sound annoyed, but her tone came across as affectionate because Papa hadn’t actually done anything wrong. We stood in their bright, airy bedroom discussing the maple furniture with its black and gold accents—I liked the intricate stenciled hearts. Greggie brushed her arthritic fingers over the corner of Papa’s...
Future Care Instructions for Your Wife with Multiple Sclerosis

Future Care Instructions for Your Wife with Multiple Sclerosis

When I can no longer grasp the tweezers to pull at the fine, blond blades between my eyebrows, please look closely. Pluck them all—imagine them as the weeds in the garden we never got to, the sumac growing up through the rhododendron. The mole on my left cheek—if you see me run my fingers over...
The Voice of Things

The Voice of Things

My wife and I moved a short while back from our crowded and lair-like house outside Boston to an abruptly more open and airy place in Amherst. Over a month in, I’m still gaping at new space and different light. The move came after thirty years in the house that most of our lives had...
Bone & Skin

Bone & Skin

1. I tell you I’m getting a tattoo to cover my scars. Some kind of tree, perhaps, the branches reaching across one scar, the roots wrapped around another. A living thing. An ancient bristlecone, a saguaro, a juniper, purple with berries. “You’re allergic to juniper,” you say, and I nod. I do not ask, “But...