Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
One
How It Begins
Kitchens: 1959
Conception
The Cold War: My Parents as Newlyweds
My Mother Gives Birth
Two
Correcting Memory
The Knocking Tree
Recalling the Leg
Nights in Tijuana
Learning to Say No at the Immaculate Conception High School
First Time
What We Didn't Talk about at Fifteen
My Mother Refuses to Wear Glasses
My Grandfather Returns after Many Years
How I Fear God
Coming Home at Seventeen
My Mother’s National Geographics
The Annunciation: Our Mothers at Church
Three
After Giving Birth, I Recall the Madonna and Child
First Pregnancy
Satisfying the God of Statistics
Preschool
Seventy Degrees in December
Checkup after the Operation to Evacuate the Dead Fetus
You Found Me in the Dry Tub, Fevered, Whispering of God
After the Miscarriage
Mother as Judas
The Pill
Language Lab, Paris, 1989
After Eleven Days of Rain
The Cow Remembers Urus
Pharaoh’s Dream
My Daughter’s Sight
My Daughter, like Eve, Realizes Nakedness
Cesarean
Four
What the Poets Could Have Been
Blurbs
Dear Mr.Houdini,
The Assumption: Mary’s Heart in the Guinness Book of World Records
What I Told the Jehovah’s Witness
Discussing Sorrow with Jesus
My Cousin Attempts Suicide in Gander Hill Prison
Jesus in the Mail
On My Husband's Thirty-Third Birthday
Living Where They Raised Me
The Beginning
The Dead Must Disappear or Join a Story
Five
My Mother among Bears
My Mother Prays to Dream of Her Dead Father
My Mother in the Garden
Mummification
The Extra Rib
Also in the Series
Back Cover