January 19, 2021
I might spend five minutes yelling into the phone, "It's me, Mamina! Your Granddaughter!" And I will hear, "Who? Who?" And I'll try and try again to no avail and think she can't hear me anymore, she can't see me anymore.
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January 05, 2021
I left after fifteen years. It was decades before I wore white, again.
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December 08, 2020
Baking is precise and often pretty; cooking, more improvisational; I like them both and lose myself that way, which is a life skill and I recommend it.
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November 17, 2020
The girl, whose name I never learned, didn’t die before the song was over, and we never saw her again.
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November 04, 2020
At twelve, I started sewing for myself and tasted command.
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October 27, 2020
I think about my mother in the garden hilling green beans, and I asked her if I could go on birth control, and she didn’t say anything, which meant “yes,” which meant “no,” which meant, “I’m hilling beans right now.
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October 13, 2020
I’m a little girl with short hair again, but I can no longer slip back into the silent games she used to play.
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September 29, 2020
Long before the virus, you and I abandoned reality. All of us together.
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September 15, 2020
No one talks of these fights later. No one talks of anything when my mother is around, and no one talks of her when she isn’t.
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September 08, 2020
She drags me to each room, to each shadow: the witch, the devil, her own figure at the space where a closet meets the wall.
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August 20, 2020
When I find the maggot-fetus on the floor of our shower, I feel intensely fearful that our skin is something that is almost all gone, almost all out;
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August 04, 2020
I know now what it means to be full to bursting with eager limbs, tears, and milk. I know, too, what it means to stretch something open with my own fullness by way of desire.
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July 28, 2020
The snow is thick, alive and panting, a roaring wall of white in the space between my father and me.
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July 17, 2020
Dragonflies can tell the real stars from glint on lake-surface. They fly to lesser suns, their wings open to duty, dipping to mire.
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July 14, 2020
Our parents rode in the enclosed cabin of our classic white Ford truck. They were talking but we couldn’t hear them. They never looked back to see us and we knew there was no room for us up in that sweetly, quiet cab.
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July 13, 2020
The more people I have met, the closer I have been to suffering. Many times, this makes me want to not meet more people, and, in fact, un-meet people, like a girl in a video I resent having seen or a boy in a gas station at which I didn’t have to stop.
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July 08, 2020
Mom turns to sand. She becomes my mother. No edges.
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July 06, 2020
Where I am living now, the seasons have no pivot... Springs are mercurial, senselessly violent in their cold and snow. I experience winter here like a death, wait endlessly for a green that will outgrow my grief.
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May 21, 2020
I told her she was the perfect mom. This was when she tried to pull the tubes from her arms the gloves from her hands. One of the nurses said, “Oh, she’s a fighter.”
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May 14, 2020
No one remembers her mother right or observes the rites to keep her whole. The woman becomes fragments, patches for quilts, and the daughter loses the needle, what North should have drawn from her hand and pinned where she could always find it.
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April 28, 2020
I ate lunch looking out at the struggling town and remembered the day your son and I showed up unannounced on your doorstep and shared our news, and how you invited the nearest relatives to celebrate our engagement with burritos and Pepsi in your formal dining room, our paper-wrapped meal eaten over a crocheted lace tablecloth.
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April 14, 2020
To my mind, I am looking at a snapshot of myself and my dad at the same age. I remember then thinking how my father, a carpenter by trade, could fix anything, and maybe a decade or so later, how he seemed to break everything. When caring for animals, it’s straightforward: be gentle with them, be firm when necessary but never hurt them.
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April 02, 2020
Where I am living now, the seasons have no pivot... Springs are mercurial, senselessly violent in their cold and snow. I experience winter here like a death, wait endlessly for a green that will outgrow my grief.
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March 19, 2020
Your sister who has gone through her own divorce not long ago and still was able to show up and walk alongside the whole time. You look at her struggle, her transformation, her healing. You study it, not wanting to miss anything.
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March 12, 2020
Dear Grandma, One day, I came home from school, and you were just gone. Mom said it was because you missed Grandpa and you missed Korea. I knew better. You left because you were fed up with me, fed up with trying to teach Korean to a granddaughter who kept refusing it.
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January 23, 2020
I am here to read, write, and draw. I am here to find solace, a new center, to torture myself in the wake of a failed marriage. I am here to avoid anyone who might perceive my heart is broken. To hide. When the sun comes out, I walk by the sea.
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