Chris and I have been going out for a month. It’s as if I have no past. Chris doesn’t ask. I haven’t told any of my old stories, the significant events of my life. We wipe the dust off the silver glass of our lives and pretend it’s insight. But it’s just a reflection. I can’t see him, only my poor, pitiful self.

-- Eden in Detox, published in Ellipsis; previously published in Wilde Frauen, Wilhelm Heyne, Munich

You watch the fire chew through the ashes at the tip of the cigarette. They watch you watch the ashes. Vermilion-hot ashes, perforated, like your brain, riddled with holes of memories they stole from you.

Your mother doesn’t say it, but she wants forgiveness for bringing you here. You heard her ask the doctor in the hallway, “Can he be saved?”

You have done this for 7,780 days in a row.

At night the cancer races through your body with a fervor, leaving gaping black-encrusted holes.

You die from the inside out.

-- “Blood”

It was hard not to see my sister’s fling with the singer at the martini bar as some sort of family experiment to see if she could summon someone to intervene. She was like that. Last year she had threatened to join the Marines. The year before, she dropped out of her second master’s program to go to Mexico. Inexplicably this time, no one did, and by fall she had given birth to the singer’s son. But alas, Sir Lancelot had long since left on a crusade of unspecified nature and unknown destination, leaving my sister to persevere alone. After the birth, my sister had vowed to remain chaste until the right man came along to play father to her son. She took to wearing prim flowered dresses, though my brother pointed out they frequently boasted necklines that showed off her cleavage, which had improved considerably upon the birth of her son, whom she breastfed. She placed icons of the Virgin Mary around her house, and my mother worried she would become Catholic. With her newfound zeal for the virtues of motherhood, the self-sacrificing and all, my sister took to addressing our mother as “the Blessed Mother.” This my mother found more distressing than my sister’s Zen Buddhism phase.

My sister proclaimed her vow was in honor of our deceased father, and she set about on a mission to find a father for her son with the same fervor I saw her pursue tickets for my brother and me to a sold-out Nirvana show in her teen-age years.

-- “Improvising”

During the sermon, I try to decide what it is about Mom that Dad doesn’t like anymore. Mom is still beautiful in her floral sundresses and white sandals, I think. But she doesn’t seem to be the same person in the old photographs Dad took before I was born, where she is standing behind Tod at his first birthday, holding him up before the glow of birthday candles. It’s a huge sheet cake with chocolate frosting. Her face is soft in the candlelight. Everything seems so hard now.

My dad extends the offering plate at the end of the pew. While the silver plates weave through the line of hands, he stands with his hands folded together and his eyes upward, reverent. In stained-glass light, he is yellow. I feel a burn in my heart, a burn that is the beginning of hatred.

-- “Self-Help,” winner of the 1997 Renwick-Sumerwell prize, published in The Crescent Review

Rob and I were as different as night and day. He was East Coast traditional, I was West Coast, not-quite conquered territory, looking another direction. I was fond of reminding him that 100 years ago, my side of the country didn’t belong to his, and was still not quite have-able, mail-order bride to a colonial groom. This was Rob: opera, a roaring rush of sound, thick and throbbing, something that soared out over the open ocean. This was me: poetry and piano, glass beads of sound, dropping into a stream, a source water yet undiscovered. Deep in the forest, the sound of water gliding over stones, a breathing thing that you hear before you see. I lived my life noticing all of its ripples and small reverberations. Rob was flying high above the clouds. He was air.

-- “Star-Crossed”