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I am in your kitchen now. / The cheerful yellow curtains buff against open windows.

plowing her grief into what she knew best / blessing the dirt in the seams of her hands

My toddler son tells me he will stop getting older by lying still

leaves preparing for winter leaving, crepuscular, desiccated, dust to dust, my mother, my fat grandmother, me.

I am a second-hand / kiddie harp, cherrywood tarnished / with elven fingerprints

I found myself wondering / what kind of person / doesn’t spell-check a death threat

She tells me she will become / an astronaut, live in the stars. I cannot answer her / when she asks if I too will go.

She / emerges, relieved and smiling. She is // blooming into the season of death

Each story in How Far I’ve Come is a gem, glittery with wit, polished with nuance, steeped in life’s inevitable, inescapable ironies.

Domestic abuse is a world; when you’re immersed in that world, it’s nearly impossible to reserve a ship off the planet.

So much of our anxiety stems from love, and the desire to be the scaffolding for the lives of those we love. But I want to remind us that we, as mothers, are also finite. We cannot hold up the world indefinitely without it breaking our backs.