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.

This couch was made for grownups, vintage grownups of the 1930s, cinch-waisted female grownups and men who wore hats and drank martinis.