sacred hush. the doors just open. lucky. any belief in danger mostly gone, siphoned away by twenty minutes of barelegged inspection & a shiny car pulling through the driveway to turn around, dismissing the need for my prepared good girl speech with a disinterested wave. no audio-video surveillance. not really. just dirty windows. just awe. all the broken mirror glass.

January 15: I dreamed an animal wanted to get out of the house, standing by the living room sliding glass door. I let it out, and after some hesitation, it was able to safely jump to the ground and hurry away. Another animal, a larger pig, was there also. It very intelligently turned around and held to the side of the porch floor and let itself down feet first.

I was supposed to be a boy. My mother didn’t do an anatomy ultrasound because she was so sure, God had revealed it in a dream. After eight hours of labor, the doctors said It’s a girl. In all my baby pictures, I am wearing blue.

If I owned a gun while I was washing dishes at the sink. You might’ve asked too if on your boyfriend’s kitchen shelf beside The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds you saw a paperback called Guns, which traced gunpowder to a 13th-century monk, catalogued the flared muzzle of the blunderbuss, illustrated Colt’s rotating cylinder, and hallowed the birth of 9mm cartridges and canonical assault rifles.

It was very dark when Stefano and I finally stumbled up the hill and fell upon the benches in front of the house to take out all of the sharp seed heads of all sorts of grasses from the crooks of our jeans, webbing of our socks, and crevices of our boots.

When there’s nowhere else to turn I open the closet. I face my suits, my length and shortness each an adjustment in proportion, flamboyance, reserve. Separates pile up all around me, what people see is the product of my previous doing and current undoing. I own the power to discard, though naked truth is not an option. My history is in there and a history of men and women dressing before me. I consider every tag.

When I first ordered sardines, I was unprepared for the ichthyomorphic jenga tower that arrived on my plate. I was at a café in Sintra, a medieval Portuguese city nestled into a hillside. Tuk-tuks sputtered past my table perched precariously at the edge of the town square. The waitress maneuvered her way along the sidewalk to deliver my lunch.