This morning, two things vanished. The first disappeared while I was in the front yard watering a young crab-apple tree we planted this spring. Absent-mindedly, I let the hose wander to a nearby bush and startled a chipmunk, who dashed out in front of me and vanished into thin air.

In the spring of 1987, as I was getting ready to go away to college, my mother was preparing to return to medicine. She had stopped practicing eighteen years before, the year that I, her second child, was born; the year she had conceded that raising children and working at the hospital were not compatible, at least with the devotion she believed each deserved.

And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod.

—Genesis 4:16

In a story with many firsts, the first man and the first woman committed the first sin and had two sons—one who offered fruit to God, one who offered blood in a garden.

The National Theater on Elm, our main street, opened in 1921 and for several years was Greensboro’s premier showcase. Vaudeville and silents played there, I understand, maybe live stage, later followed by sound and color.

The call came in the dark in the hour of sleep when you don’t know your own name. It came from a voice so fragmented that I thought at first it was two animals baying down the phone line. I kept asking: What?

Notes for White Girls

Roaches bubbling out of drawers and dirty cabinets, so many that each time a boyfriend asked for something to eat, I’d run to the kitchen, turn on the light, and squash whatever was running with the palm of my hand. They thought I asked them to sit in the living room and wait because I liked serving them.

In an open room of a clean theatre

two children concentrate on rolling

a thousand napkins with the right

crease. That is intimacy. I am no longer

Here’s a shot I hope says I’m a victim.

I hope one says I’m used to having my hand

in the dirt. I’m a what’s next type. Filter out

through focus. Distort at your leisure. Have me

If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with.

—Ronald Reagan

In this the latest version of history, which looks, as we enter into it,
Like just another block of vacants recolonized after being boarded up,
Boards now torn down but still no water or electricity, and so the street

Stuck out in the court’s

fringes again, follow-

through fingers hitched

below my bottom rib

like a name buckle

The downstairs windows

in our townhouse opened

as awkwardly as the front door

after the last shoulder-in.

Men in undershirts stare down,

toss out wastebaskets of receipts

like crumpled moths that keep striving to fly

against the dark brick, all the way to the ground.

It must feel good

deep in her throat

and all through her belly and leg bones,

so she just won’t stop

Cool sweeps over the streambed lip, say here & here, then, bare

ankles in hug; these intimate moments at dusk; what dissipates;

what stands in the place of gone when the jaw, in gape, remains a

restless O, & wide to tunnel inward; say incessant just beyond the

You open, wing-like & one-sided. How halves make the smirk

& you always two things gathering. Together, repeats you.

Opposites never really dance on ends; instead, this infinite loop,

which goes on without us, because our anatomy knows of

We’re returning to Cambodia together, father and daughter,

and he walks away from the wide Prek Eng road,

me rolling the black suitcase, chin down.

There are so many ways I bring him shame.

When I saw my father walking

I thought he might look like a man

afraid to die. Ahead

I kicked the road,

What’s taken in of us,

by you, asked to be there

stuck to your hands,

legs, and face. We all wanted to stay

She said I’ll be back soon mijo—

but in our windows, there’s still no glass,

when raindrops hit the sill

they touch my skin like her eyes did

At fifty-two years old, Julian Swenson died on the roadside in his swim trunks. Traffic passed by without interruption along the four lanes of Cevdet Paşa Cadessi, which shouldered the Bosphorus, running through Istanbul’s posh Bebek quarter.