According to maternal lore, I was supposed to be a twin. My mother grew so fat when she was pregnant that her doctors thought perhaps there were two of us hiding inside her swollen womb. Doctors even heard two heartbeats at one point and when her weight tipped 200 lbs…

I want to ask you all about the meeting. And how it went. And why you were gone for so long this year. I want to bring you home and make my mother’s split pea soup for you. …

The lights were bright on my face when they held you up above the stark, white sheet. So much bustling and moving around the room. Shiny instruments of pain and remedy all around. Masked faces-pulling, snipping, sewing me tight. My body, but another body down below. That fat girl in…

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the homeless man I thought may have been Jesus. He would move, hunched forward, heavy with the weight of a hundred coats, slouching toward some unknown destination as if he had walked from an Inuit Eskimo Igloo except that it was Los Angeles…

Grandpa had a vase made of red clay that lay atop hard surfaces everywhere we moved. I used to think it contained the ashes of all my dead relatives including grandpa. On it were carved horses carrying majestic women into some kind of foreign battle: helmets, shields, an amulet hanging…

The view over the hilltop home was a farewell to day, Bright as a supernova: Resplendent orange bursting juice across the horizon. She was a fortune teller signaling the end of something but I wasn’t listening. It was my birthday and we were posh as the women we used to…

The year my mom died, I would awaken, deep in the belly of the night, screaming. It was also the year my youngest son was having what they call in pediatric journals “Night Terrors.” He was inconsolable and would wake with red hot cheeks and swollen gums. I too would…

My second son came into the world on a rainy day with “El Fuego” in his eyes and in his heart. You could almost see it reflecting off the stainless steel instruments, gurney and in the sweaty forehead of the obstetrician as she placed him in my arms. I hesitated…

The old woman is bamboo in a rushing river and drowning- People behind her stand in the line-an Apple store. They stare, cough uncomfortably. Ask to “go ahead.” Firm with wrinkled hands,-a lifetime of doing dishes, making dumplings, shaping lives.“Getting old sucks.” She smiles. A bird, the wind, a stranger…Daughter, mother, grandmother… This marvel has powered a universe over these last eighty years but can’t hear her name as the “Operations Expert” calls it.