God, if there's anything entering this piece, let it be a breeze not another flood. No one gives news about a war without splashing blood on faces, without digging a hollow, without an arrow or a sword inside hearts. Tell me the best way to sing a dirge. Or the best way to pronounce someone's death. There is nothing like he died while sleeping, emptiness had already filled the body, and a well is already dug inside the relatives. Everyday, we count dead ones like grains—if it is not an …

My teen is learning another language. Nouns only get him so far. Round verbs clash with square pronouns. Roles befuddle fluency. We joke, we sing. Mom (loud) and kid (embarrassed). We pick up cuss words, gingerly, like dropped fruit (bruised but still good). Months of drudgery, then he drafts paragraphs about a family tree, and the apple does not fall all that far from the trunk. *** I quit shaving my legs when the kids were little. It just happened, slowly, during blustery seasons …

I walk our high school track under the noonday sun as young Carter the Punter goes about his ritual in the end zone 75 yards away. I work where Carter is a student and venture outside whenever possible, the mountain air has a way of breaking my fatigue. Carter talks to himself as he stretches; his voice resembles a muppet and carries well. In good and ill-tempered weather, he will be here with his duffle bag of tools: a small pump, ten footballs, exercise bands, two pairs of cleats, and a …

iii. When we arrived, my mother was already dead. The smell was antiseptic and my senses were overwhelmed by the acrid and the fluorescent, the sound of sneaker friction against worn floors, the collaborative din of life-supporting machines. I carried a box of new ballet slippers, tokens to carry me into summer camp. She was covered by a thin white sheet, face turned toward us, hollow human shell without the mother force thrumming things along. iii./v. The look of death is shared. Our unique …

We couldn’t find the labyrinth, which was maddening because I’d been there before and was convinced we were in the right place. Much of what I’d remembered seemed to have been drained or extracted from the scene. There was no more outrageous, biblical sea foam that had once claimed so much of the beach. The dozens of painstakingly stacked cairns previous wanderers had constructed for those after them had been disassembled or washed away. Most disconcerting was the total disappearance of the …

We met at the gentlemen’s club near Times Square with a dark, damp interior that imitated the color and heaviness of a black forest cake. I moved in a slow pull around the golden mini stage pole next to the V.I.P. lounge. I was there for the view of the man who had the entire section roped off. He sat, body like a soup dumpling, with dancers all around him, but his eyes were focused on me. As I stepped off the stage, he motioned for me, flicking the other girls off like gorged mosquitos. My …