On those nights she found weeds growing in her body.

Long tendrils of tangled shapes twisting between bones, slicing Like tight string.

She lay shivering in the long darkness of morning…

I was conceived in grief. My tiny body formed within the whirl of hormones that mixed with anguish and made me. Three months after my brother died, I was created from a desperate and lonely love that was already unthreading….

That night you held his large-knuckled, dying hand in your small, life-filled one for hours and hours and never once let go. You slept upright, somehow, in that plastic and vinyl hospital chair jammed next to his bed in the tiny room overlooking the church….