One For Your Mother
Published in The Citron Review On Sundays, we clean, my mother and I, while the boys do yard work with our father. Bette Midler lends the soundtrack to our scrubbing; I turn the nozzle on…
Sleep, Luck, and The Hours In Between
Published on mother.ly Other parents like to tell me I’m lucky that my children sleep. That they sleep in their own rooms, in their own beds, with sound machines and night lights and their favorite plush unicorns…
Mother/Mutt
First published at Reckon Review Our mother rescued a mutt after we all grew up and left her. She had been abandoned, she said. The mutt had, too. I had escaped to college; my brothers…
Scheduled Worry Time
Published in The Hellebore. The mirror is brand new, freshly installed by the builder of our new home, and when I look into it, I can still smell the crispness of the eggshell-white paint on…
Old Faithful
Published in Beaver Magazine. What is the word for a mother who has lost a child? It is not widow, or woman, or childless, or unmothered. It is geyser. She seethes, acrid bubbles of rage…
Fancy Seeing You Here
Published by HAD. The last time I saw the man who fired my mother for grieving her son’s death for five days instead of the three days of bereavement he’d so graciously suggested, he was…
I think I’ve seen this film before
First published in Scissors & Spackle. where the girl goes from smitten to bitten, scratch marks on her forearms, fingerprints fleck the flesh under her necklace, collarbone tender to touch but of her lover she…
And Still, I Collect the Corks
First published in The Corvus Review. Save me your corks, mother said, so I popped a bottle of prosecco, a cork sprung from the rim, and a dainty glass to drink from. It was sweet…
Anatomy of the Postpartum Mother
First published in Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine. There is a species of frog, the gastric-brooding frog, that births babies from its mouth. They haven’t been seen since 1983, are believed to be extinct. The mother…