Category: Nonfiction

Oh, I know this poem is not about me. And I know my husband keeps secrets. I'm glad.

I tell myself love can happen for me like it did with Scully and Mulder. Every time the world separated them, they always managed to find a way back to one another, even across countries, space and time.

I never did ask how he had drowned the kittens. I dug a little grave in my mind to bury my stunned anger. For four months, we lived in limbo, working a series of odd jobs. I remember that time now as a sort of zombie period, both of us shuffling through the dark, waving our arms ahead of us but failing to find each other through the gloom.

“Sit up, all the way up. Straight.” He poured medicine from a vial into the small cup, prepared the face mask, and pushed it toward me. “Deep breaths.”

The man should have known distance is already in her. / It moves her farther from them all, it has her / collapse on the bathroom floor heaving / obscenities into her faith and not feeling / the least bit guilt for each four-lettered cry.

Between her hospital room and home, there are miles / of darkness she must learn / to make light. She must understand again / this is not she. She is locked away in some distant cell / in some faraway prison in some remote city / she doesn’t know the name of, let alone / …

I am neither poet nor composer, but in writing this book, I have had to become both.

As I drove out to Kroger for my first few shifts, I was struck by the way the store’s building seemed totally enveloped by the surrounding mountains. Being from a relatively flat part of central Maryland how enormous they appeared, and how green, on the verge of autumn. They still impress me as my time here passes, but sometimes it’s like they’ve inexplicably receded as, almost daily, I drive up 460 and park in the designated employee lot and ignore them as I walk through the front doors.