I breathed through the tube and didn’t die, and finally I looked down and saw them. All these small fish streaking by, silvery and orange and pink, hermit crabs scuttling around the rocks, tufts of seagrass with tiny shrimp.

I told everyone, when I wrote the note I was thinking of sand.

I told everyone, when I wrote the note it was sand.

My mother knows nothing

more than I do but she carries it better.

If she were a metaphor I could turn into her.

And that's one of the things about poetry that is differentiated from prose—it can have these parallel universes as you read through it. I do think about the kind of multiverse feeling that a poem can have.

The waiting room is a collage of almosts: almost asleep, almost calm, almost able to explain.

Sometimes she’ll circle whatever town we’re in with a wine bottle between her honey-brown knees, passing the bottle to me now and then, tussle my curls and kiss my hand.