Contents
Preface
One
Country of Strangers
Driving by the Old Homestead
Mountains Like Ribs
The Homesteader’s Wife
Today Is All They Have
Baking Lessons
Momma Said
The Winter Meat
My Father Hilling Potatoes
Two
Girl Made of Fog
Summer Untethered
Hum
Leda
Horse Called Charlie
Along the Print
Sleepwalking toward Myself
Stealing the Strawberries
No One Asks about the Bridge
In the Playhouse
Sleeping the Chickens
Childhood, Swallow
Ice’s Apprentice
December’s Tree
Three
Survival Tactics
Painting the Stones
The Button Box
Above the Garage
The Card Shark
Because Music Is Green
Neighbors
The Earth Is Breakable
I Watch the Hired Men Pick Potatoes
Our Father Leaving Us
Night Sounds
He’s Talking
Someone Should Have Kicked the Pedophiles off Our Place
Four
Tower Bells
Leaving for the University
Whole
Her Garden
May, at My Father’s Burial
To Dust
On Being Disinherited
Coming Out of Nowhere
Acknowledgments
Notes from the Preface