Every Wednesday in winter, when there was hardly anyone else there, I went down to the beach and read until sunset.
My name is YaYa. I’m sitting here in the corner of my daughter’s home, surrounded by toddlers and their parents.
The micro-spikes I’ve strapped to the bottom of my trail runners make me feel confident.
I remind you of my generational trauma as you carry another box to the moving truck, but you don’t respond.
One summer, we sat on the stoop in front of my best friend’s building and her mother taught us to crochet.
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.”