through many years
of a young man’s life;
While you shifted gears
from girlfriend to wife

and watched me grasp
the bare, stripped ends
of a wish by the wires, clasped
and burning in my hands,

what you must know now.
After fifteen years in,
what you must know now.

After my mother took you in
(when no one else wanted you,
and I see why)
you threatened to beat her.

When she was diagnosed
with cancer, you told her she
wouldn’t live to see her grandchild.

Not long ago I took
a page from a book my mother
had given me as a gift long ago
and I wrote

K A T
H L E
E N

in block letters across
it. I broke your name.

Then I burned it and buried
the ashes deep in a patch of
barren earth by our house
on a night with no moon.

That land is empty – no one walks
there or lives there. It is an absent thing
owned by absent people.

If there is any magic left in me
(and if there is, I can’t feel it)
I used it to curse you.

Specifically: that you be forgotten
before you even die -
and that you end up trapped,
in the ground, impotent and immobile and
raging and whimpering as your
body rots around you.

I told Diana and Jason and Leo that I
would wait for you to die, and then I would drive
to Memphis and piss on your grave.

This is better than that. It is
better. But it is still less
than you deserve.

is an inescapable ghost, assuring them:
they are meant for more,
to open up the frightening door,
to stand where “branch” becomes “stem”

and to make bets on themselves.
I don’t mean to say that one is better
but there’s a difference between living on shelves
and seeking mysteries in secret letters.

Understanding that the choice exists
at all is a form of deciding, anyways.
It might be best to hide the other ways.
Besides, a calm, easy, simple life resists

growing up knowing you are either off or on -
that there is one way, but there is no middle.
So, as a father, which is the bigger con:
Teaching that life should be big? Or little?

and you are everything, too.

Every word I say is
like a bridge in Michigan.

My hands have hurt in
these last few weeks,
right elbow locking and frying some
ulnar nerve without real

provocation, and when I stay up late
or I, in distraction, try to pull errant
weeds from the front canna beds
I have worried on your behalf.

I am making videos
of me for my daughter
because I keep thinking
about pictures of you.

Our mother was one of the few genuinely good people we’ve ever known. She was capable of both delivering and experiencing immense joy, and served as both our light and our glue. She gloried in her family and friends. She was too young and too good for this. She deserved more peace and happiness – and less difficulty – than was afforded to her over the years.

Our mother will become greater than all of us, and she lived as the best among us. She will not just be a mother or wife or sister or grandmother that died. Because of her, families that had been somewhat estranged by distance and time and difficulty became a single large unit – she was our matriarch, and her iron will forged us into something greater than we were, multiple threads of family woven into one. She was our historian, and her stories and hard-bitten memories of a tough early life informed us of a world we otherwise could not have imagined. She grew up in hard times and then ensured that we never wanted for anything.

She was our mother, and in that role we could not have asked for a better or stronger woman. She did everything she was supposed to do and more – she took care of us when we were sick, celebrated our victories, comforted us in defeat, punished severely those that dared harm us, and pointed us – rather firmly at times – in what was inexorably the right direction.

She was a big sister to our Aunt Vicki, and despite lives that took divergent paths, they maintained a close relationship over the years and helped each other through hard times. She loved her niece Cheyenne and her nephews Travis and Heath dearly, and counted their father Jeff and stepfather Randy among her close friends.

She was a wife to our father, Gary, whom she’d known since she was very young, and before my brother and I came along they cared for 42 foster children. Their long friendship made them wonderful parents and helped forge the people my brother and I would become, in all we know about right and wrong and how to live a life worth living. In these more recent years, our mother and father grew closer than ever and our mother adored Tammy, our stepmother. They joined forces in arranging and managing my wedding day, and have more or less been sisters ever since.

She was a wife to our stepfather, Leo, and this was a gift to us as much as to herself. Leo is an amazing man, and like our mother, he is pure of heart and selfless. We are honored to know him and proud and thankful to have his love. Our mother was happy with him, and the beautiful life they built together was good for all of us. Leo is our blood now, as is his entire family, all of whom loved my mother with abandon. We have all been drawn to the same tribe, called and initiated by her. We’ll wear those marks forever, and we are better for it.

After all that she was and is, our mother has one more role to play. She will become our ancestor, and it is that becoming over which we stumble now. We will someday do our best to honor her with the dignity and integrity and grace and utter selflessness that defined her and that we have tried so very hard to learn. Our best hope in life is to emulate her brilliance and give of ourselves to others as purely as she always did. We will tell our children about her and they will know her name, and who she was, and what she means to us.

But that peace is not within us now. There is no quiet where we are. Our well is dry, and the buckets come back up empty. Now we choose to scour our hearts, and we scour them with grief.

We feel that it is acceptable to admit our grief because our mother admitted her grief to us, showing us that it is unavoidable and a path in life that must be walked. Years after her own mother died, she burst into tears telling us about how badly it hurt, and how much she missed her. She was destroyed by the death of her father, Richard, the pain of which we all feel deeply still. She felt this grief so keenly because she loved so deeply; and as we loved her so deeply, so too are we brought low by this unbelievable, crippling pain. We are wounded; the well is dry; we scour our hearts.

But even as we grieve we are thankful for so many things. We are thankful that our mother essentially picked our wives – two more things she was right about – and adored them so much. We are thankful that, in no small part because of our mother’s will, we have such a large and loving family. We are thankful that within the core of our family, we have had no outstanding estrangements, no resentment, no bad feelings. We all love each other; what’s more, we all like each other.

We are thankful that our mother taught us to love each other in a way that made getting through this possible. And I think, most of all, we are thankful for our mother’s humor. Our mother’s wit was bone dry and her comic timing was wonderful, and if either of us have a gift for making people laugh, we inherited the execution and craft of it from her.

She maintained her sense of humor even throughout her sickness. I am not fabricating the following tale one bit: as Leo and my brother and I were arranging her sheets after we’d brought her home, she grimaced after being lifted. My brother said, “Hang in there, Mom, we just have one more sheet to go. You’re doing great.” She slowly raised one hand, smiled, and flipped us off.

Later, as we feared the end and gathered around her, I told her that we all loved her, and that if she wanted to go, it was okay. She looked right at me, cocked an eyebrow, and said “Joshua, I will not be pushed.” Though we all laughed and she smiled again, I am quite certain that she meant it.

We tell you now that our mother was a saint, and that her only fault was giving too much of herself. As her sons, we have tried to do right by her and become worthy of the upbringing she worked so hard to give to us. As we were faced with difficult news and tough decisions in recent days and weeks, we knew that above all else she wanted to be at home when she died, and we fulfilled that wish.

In the end, she went home. Soon we will give her to the earth and wind and water. It was better for all the world when she lived and walked among us, and the land will know when she returns to it. But in the end, she went home, and when she got there she was happy and peaceful.

As for us, it is hard. It is hard to be left behind. It is hard to be the ones who stay. And it is okay to admit that it is hard, because telling all of you how hard this is for us brings us together in honoring her, even if we must do it in short and simple words. We call to her by all of her names – Donna Paulette Peck; Donna Paulette Berthume; Donna Paulette Peltier. We love her, and she loved us. This is hard. This hurts.

As our mother taught us to be strong, she expects us to carry on, and so we will. We will be okay. We will fill up again. But for now, the well is dry, and the buckets come back up empty. Now there is no quiet where we are. Now we scour our hearts.

that even though the wind blew
and blew things all over the
office and tore magnets off of our
refrigerator, I did it anyways.
I opened windows;
the wind blows and blows.

I have lived in this town
with my wife for almost
ten years, save for 2004
when I took her back to Boston.
I have learned to love it -
but only just, and only now.

The beginning of that love,
I think, has always happened
in the spring, right around my birthday
when the trees are dead one day
and a riot the next, and then:
the wind blows and blows.

Many of our old friends live in Brooklyn now.
I miss them. But old friends from before
Denton are here with us and make life sweet,
and some spring nights on a porch or lawn,
I feel loved and lucky. I feel my potential, still;
I still think of what I might become.

Other nights with new friends, this
town feels as much like home as Boston
does for me. Home is a thing that happens.
I have become just as much of
who I am here than any where else;
the wind blows and blows.

Soon the nights will be still and sticky
and the days will take on words like stove settings –
‘bake’ and ‘roast’ (and maybe ‘fricassee’)
and I’ll wish for this wind and wait for autumn.
Home is a thing that happens to a place;
the wind, it blows and blows.

I’ll bet she smiled thin, like a wire
stooping as she set the fire
did you maybe kick the tires
before you went to jail

We spend our lives in search of a better
version of ourselves, a vision that matches the myth –
but we all fall short of what we think we ought to be
and how we ought to be to the ones we’re with.

A different life would find you free
and being what you’re supposed to be
instead of on an arson spree
to which the cops respond

Thought it up around the house and
brought it up, took off her blouse and
now you’re both out twenty thousand
dollars on the bond.

We spend our lives in search of a better
version of ourselves, a vision that matches the myth –
but we all fall short of what we think we ought to be
and how we ought to be to the ones we’re with.