“At night she began cooking things in the kitchen, things too strange to mention. She steeped oleander in boiling water, and the roots of a vine with white trumpet flowers that glowed like faces. She soaked a plant collected in moonlight from the neighbors’ fence, with little heart-shaped flowers. Then she cooked the water down; the whole kitchen smelled like green and rotting leaves. She threw out pounds of the wet-spinach green stuff into somebody else’s dumpster. She wasn’t talking to me anymore. She sat on the roof and talked to the moon.”

“I liked it when my mother tried to teach me things, when she paid attention. So often when I was with her, she was unreachable. Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.”

“Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.”

“Talk to me. Look up, I thought. But she didn't, only stopped and picked a sprig of alyssum to smell the honey. I cut a shred from my heart and dangled it on a homemade hook before her.”

“We parked in back and walked down the stairs with their polished brass railings, past the old-fashioned kitchen. We could see the chefs cooking. It smelled like stew, or meat loaf, the way time should smell, solid and nourishing.”

“Always learn poems by heart,' she said. 'They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.”

“Oleander time, she said. Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind. ”