Aunt Celestina carefully packaged party gifts for the kids in red-and-white polka-dot boxes she’d bought at the Dollar Store.
There’s an intruder in my kitchen.
I love music but I don’t dance. The rare times I’m asked I politely decline, but this guy was especially insistent.
We tramp around the lily pad-filled lake, eavesdropping on conversation fragments.
“Excuse me.” A man wanted to sit on my aisle seat.
On line at ShopRite, the plump woman behind me, lifting a package of pickled beets from my cart, asks “Are these any good?”
“Daddy, twirl!” our five-year-old daughter squeals the first time she sees them wearing a dress.
“Five minutes remaining!” is the shout of my coach as the workout hits the home stretch.
She is like a rosebush in her long dress of bold pink and red flowers.
Every morning, my daughter spritzes them with her purple spray bottle decorated with mermaid stickers.
I missed my period, I tell him. His wide eyes betray hope.
On the hot Upper West Side, I was rising from traumas’ ashes.
My condo overlooks a school parking lot. Occasionally, a car arrives, cones are placed, and a teenager slides into the driver’s seat.
The ceiling fans swayed; the beds jiggled.
My youngest is the first to call it. “The mom is going to die.”
Everyone is speaking French. She tries a few words, but her new mother-in-law cuts her off.
Each Christmas was the same as the previous one.
I stand on the hillside and watch under hot sun. “Take your marks.”
It’s eight in the morning. It feels so odd being the only passenger in the car.
A tiny, blank scrap of paper is my most cherished love letter.