I’m culling needless items from kitchen, baths, and linen closets. I’m curating friendships. Now it’s your turn to go.

She didn’t have to love me. Biology didn’t force her hand the way it does for mothers.

In the grit of a 1975 farm town, 9-year-old girls weigh about 60 pounds, even wicked little girls with bad women for mommas.

I can tell you this now. Both times I was pregnant, I worried. I doubted my ability to raise a girl.

I travel around the world and strangers pay me to write poems for them on a typewriter in the street—that’s how I’ve made my living for the last eight years.

Every time I see my father, he asks me if I have lost weight. He has done this since I was a child.

The Iranian blue-glazed pottery sat on our parents’ shelves for years.

One night in my mid-teens, I was under the covers in my sister’s bedroom, deep asleep, while flames spread from a nearby candle.

“Put on your winter coat and get a warm blanket,” I told my daughter. “We’re going out to look at Christmas lights.”

February 3, 1946. Rain pounded the railcar’s roof. Karl felt as if inside a drum. A stuffy drum, smelling of wet wool and unwashed bodies.