Contents
Sweeping this One Room
Memory
Sisters
The Absence of Bounty
My Father and Johnny
Geography Lesson
My Mother, Becoming a Widow
The Day You Died I thought It Would Be as Hars As Having to Haul All My Furniture into the Backyard Then Sweep up in Less Than an Hour
Thick As Fig Leaves
How I Still Think of You
You Are Sitting Across from Me at the Kitchen Table in Full Sun
For My Husband, Who Prefers Sex to Gardening
I Like to Imagine We Are Starting Over
At Morrow Mountain
Let's Say We Haven't Seen Each Other Since Ninth Grade and We Meet as Adults at a Welcome Center in Southside Virginia
When She hears the One She Loves and Cannot Have, Say a Word as Beautiful and Tender as the Word 'Arbor'
Shredding the Letters
I Am My Mother, Primping
Why I Yell at My Husband
On What Would Have Been Our Twenty-Fifth Anniversary
Now Adam
The Mad are Full of Themselves
Don't Pretend to Be Surprised
Yard Sale: Charlotte, N.C.
Mothers, Attend the Women Your Sons Marry
Primer on Digging
Before the News
The Sorrow in Schoolyards
Why I'm Against Liposuction
In the Periodical Room
Mary Lamb: The Murder
Sorrow, Looking Like Abraham Lincoln, Keeps Knocking on My Back Door
Three Reasons to Stop Banging Your Head against the Wall
Hope, Which for Years Kept Resurfacing, Now Crumbles
In a New Country
I Have Known Stairs
At Every Wedding Someone Stays Home
Almost Fifty
Found Poem
The Barnum & Bailey of Craziness