The woman who used to be the girl in the triptych mirror is standing in her bedroom looking at her husband’s sleep apnea machine placed on the floor next to the bed.

Joseph doesn’t beat Wanda. With his fists anyway. He’s shouting up the stairs at her as we sit on the bed listening to her mother’s records and trying on make-up I brought over.

She seemed a bit better that morning, but we kept the appointment, expecting to be sent home in the sheeting rain with a floppy bag of expensive food and an orange tube of pills.

Eddie’s dad was a psychopath who delighted in cruelty to his children and their friends and one night…

Sometimes I still see myself as a refugee, a small child with thick black hair that people like to pet. I grew up in America, the pinnacle of the modern West, but my reality was another world.

My son is still with me. We are sitting in the grass on a warm summer evening, looking up, when the star-burdened sky . . .

I play in the forest near our apartment building assigned by the American military ten years after the war is over. I am building . . .

Your bony shoulders, red pepper, tell me you’re ready to go wherever we take you—