Check out the moment when Jane Fonda tells her dying father, that she thinks he doesn’t like her, she’s lonely, always has been. A cold...

My brother dragged around his loathing like a bag of rocks — riding buses all over the city to avoid being home, joining sports teams – hockey, baseball, soccer — so many games we never attended. He would swing that heart-sized bag with both hands — how he had no boots for his winter paper route, how often she said, I ruined my figure for you? all those forced dinners seated between drunk parents, how our mother could get our father to beat us. Sometimes, my brother took care

I was sure I knew Ferron, having traversed her emotional interior album after album. I knew each breath, supposed every heartache...

I found out from a psychic after my mother died that she was an alien from another galaxy – a Tadpole, Blackeye, or Cartwheel galaxy –...

We both bought Yamaha guitars in high school, played Neil Young songs - I held the melody as Patti harmonized. I had loved her since...

when my mum travelled to Ontario. He’d make us a schedule – slender pencil listing our five names, neat column with chores next to each...

I wasn’t my mother’s first choice to take her little dog. My sisters said in unison, No, No, when I volunteered as we ate pasta at the...

Frightening how a sound can stay with you – bird songs, especially before dawn. I don’t remember his name, the guy Lori coaxed me into...

As the middle-aged black man approached us on the sidewalk, early August, my little Shih Tzu stopped, bracing her stride against my...

At eleven years old, I was too young to be left alone on Friday nights. My parents brought me along to Wilma’s, their widowed friend from...

I wanted my son to be a baseball player, not for the money, but for the elegance of the game, the rhythm of it, pitch after pitch,...

Because sometimes late at night when you stood crying in the kitchen doorway, your father would stop calling your mother a cunt and she...

My secret lies between us, like a corner, a pointed edge pressing against the ribs. We keep our distance in the warmth of summer, legs...

Who can I find to scream and dance with me? My neighbor’s window flickers TV blue green. My mother is sleeping in a different time zone....

Hiking can be meditative; trick is finding a pace and following it. I’m not sure he hears me. Passing granite outcrops, we scramble over...

In the mint green hospital room, I notice every gesture of your birth family. The lilting voices, how often they pass you around, the...

At twelve, Elizabeth asked my mother about sex. Being a practical woman, she thought it best to kill two birds with one stone and so...

Kim turned 13 a month before I did. We got our periods that year, her boobs were bigger than mine. She smelled of Love’s Fresh Lemon. We...

I hadn’t been naked in front of my mother since I was five years old. This year we took her for her first time to Calistoga. Mum, do you...

How bold it was to suggest to my fellow poet not to use the term hairy center in her bee and apple blossom poem. Burying their bulbous...