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Stacy Julin < Back to Breakthroughs Issue LAST MEAL Stacy Julin 00:00 / 00:32 LAST MEAL Stacy Julin That last meal as a family was difficult. He struggled to swallow the food down between sobs. The kids were quiet. He said it was the best meal he had ever eaten, but it was over for me. Twenty years of sadness and cheating. I admit my heart ached for him, but after he left, nothing would stop me now from locking that door. This poem was written at a very hard time in my life. Now, when I look back on it, I'm really proud of myself. I taught my children something very important. No one deserves to be treated badly, and you are strong enough to leave. Previous STACY JULIN'S work has been published in Oyster River Pages , Pirene’s Fountain , Sweet Tree Review , Southern Quill , and Word Fountain , and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks, A Pebble Thrown in Water (Tiger’s Eye Press, 2010), Visiting Ghosts and Ground (Finishing Line Press, 2018), and Things We Carry (Finishing Line Press, 2024). She lives with her family at the base of the beautiful Wasatch Mountains. facebook.com/Stacydixonsplace/ Next

Star Coulbrooke < Back to Breakthroughs Issue AEROBICS BY GOD Star Coulbrooke 00:00 / 02:10 AEROBICS BY GOD Star Coulbrooke It was a class for women only, women in the same church honing their bodies for husbands who told them God said it was good to be fit, and ever since birth control, women could be. So every Tuesday morning they followed a church-approved leader through ladylike routines in new leotards and ballet shoes, embarrassed at the sight of butts and legs they’d never seen before, their shapes always having been covered in Sunday pleats and gathers. Gradually, as confidence crept in with dance steps mastered to such easy routine they could have walked it in their sleep, their thoughts began to wander, endorphins they hadn’t owned since puberty pushing them into loving their muscles, liking their new form–such energy! A few of the ladies quit, went off to the fitness center in town and started working out with weights. They bought cross-training shoes, aerobics and lifting on alternate days. Made excuses for not going out with the family on weekends, went running on Saturdays, hot-tubbing Sunday. They were looking sharp, feeling like they could conquer the world. One ran for public office, two divorced. I burned up a new pair of shoes every six months, got so tight and sinewy I stopped my cycle, no more monthly bleeding, just energy, energy and power. I could carry six bags of groceries to the car myself, no cart, no sweat. I could stay up until midnight baking, doing laundry, cleaning the bathroom. I’d fall into bed, sleep hard until five, get up and go like hell. One day my man voiced his usual complaints and I decked him. All from a church-ladies gentle aerobics class ordered by God. "Aerobics by God" was published in Both Sides from the Middle (Helicon West Press, 2018) , Perspective s, Center for Women and Gender online magazine, Utah State University, and Logan Canyon Blend, Blue Scarab Press, Pocatello, Idaho. The breakthrough that made this one a classic to perform was the realization that I could stretch the facts in my poems to get at the truth as well as the humor of a situation. Writing the poem in this style was empowering for me, a divorced woman going back to school in my forties, especially when my mentor, the late Ken Brewer, former poet laureate of Utah, got such a kick out of reading this poem to audiences across Utah. Previous STAR COULBROOKE was the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Logan City, Utah, and is founder/coordinator of the Helicon West Reading Series. Her poetry collections are Thin Spines of Memory, Both Sides from the Middle , and City of Poetry. mappingliteraryutah.org/utah-writers/star-coulbrooke Next

Stacy Julin < Back to Breakthroughs Issue ALMOST Stacy Julin 00:00 / 00:46 ALMOST Stacy Julin If not for God and penicillin, life would have been hours long. As a moth lives, young and oblivious. Dreams, ambitions – like the snowflakes, were too delicate on a window. Melting before I could touch them. The watching stars must have made bets, popped popcorn to watch those almost-moments, like a predictable football game. If I could see it laid out, with the warning of big bumps, like a topographical map, I might hide underground in fear of the coming. Better to be like the moth, who flies in the light, not knowing. Published in The Southern Quill . In the process of writing this poem, I started to realize how important it is that we don't know our future. We are living at our best, and not living "in fear of the coming." Previous STACY JULIN'S work has been published in Oyster River Pages , Pirene’s Fountain , Sweet Tree Review , Southern Quill , and Word Fountain , and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks, A Pebble Thrown in Water (Tiger’s Eye Press, 2010), Visiting Ghosts and Ground (Finishing Line Press, 2018), and Things We Carry (Finishing Line Press, 2024). She lives with her family at the base of the beautiful Wasatch Mountains. facebook.com/Stacydixonsplace/ Next

Star Coulbrooke < Back to Breakthroughs Issue RED CAMARO Star Coulbrooke 00:00 / 02:47 RED CAMARO Star Coulbrooke Monday, September 1st, 1997. I’ve had this Camaro ten years to the day. Got it when I was thirty-six, in the prime of my life. Red Camaro Sport Coupe with a story. Today I’m selling it to my neighbor for his daughter’s sixteenth birthday. The daughter, pouty smile, dark curly hair, bare feet, and a wild reputation came over for a test drive Friday night. Said, when she came back after fifteen minutes, My dad told me if I liked it I could have it. I really like it. I’ve liked it too. I’ve loved that red Camaro. Loved it and depended on it, bought it from a friend, used it for my job selling insurance and investments. That car was the wild card I drew when my husband, who had a couple of lucid months toward the end of our 23 ½-year marriage, my husband who was feeling magnanimous said, Why don’t we refinance the house and buy you a car? You choose the one. My husband, chastened by his last few escapades against the doctrine of marriage and continuing in a rare stretch of generosity, did not complain when I added to the mortgage loan our daughter’s wedding and a full set of furniture for our recently-finished basement. By the time his mood swung back to surly, I’d made my plan of escape. The title was in my name. I had the keys. I stepped on the gas pedal and raced right out of my old life. Kept the new furniture. Found an apartment I couldn’t keep—couldn’t pay rent and utilities working part-time and going back to school—so I gave the furniture to the married daughter who sold it when she ran into hard times. Now I’m selling the red Camaro, my symbol of freedom. It’s a blood-letting. I’m weak and shaky with anticipation. That wild young neighbor girl will drive it to school and boys will chase her and she’ll get in trouble. But it will give her new freedom, that car, and maybe it will give her life new meaning. Yes, this is the way I’ll imagine it all. The men in her life will find they don’t own her. Just like I did, she’ll escape in that declaration of red Camaro, that symbol of wildness and freedom, that independent woman’s car. When Covid hit in March 2020, I retired from my job at Utah State University, helped my husband build an addition on our house, and took care of him until he died from cancer in June 2023. I thought I had lost my ability to write poetry. But I turned to memoir writing and started mining pieces from my old journals. They have turned into prose poem memoirs, a new style for me, a real breakthrough. Previous STAR COULBROOKE was the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Logan City, Utah, and is founder/coordinator of the Helicon West Reading Series. Her poetry collections are Thin Spines of Memory, Both Sides from the Middle , and City of Poetry. mappingliteraryutah.org/utah-writers/star-coulbrooke Next

Andrea Hollander < Back to Breakthroughs Issue IT'S OKAY Andrea Hollander 00:00 / 02:20 IT'S OKAY Andrea Hollander In so many films, a family gathers around the bed of the one near death, hoping the far-off son will get there in time. The family doctor stands at the foot in his three-piece suit. If the film takes place early in the last century, maybe a new, black Ford pulls up in the gravel drive. We in the theater, buckets of popcorn in our laps, hear the crunch of its tires. Such a scene I never privileged firsthand, my 51-year-old mother having died alone just after dawn in that pale green room on the third floor of the hospital, where I drove every day to be with her those last weeks. I want to imagine a flurry of birdsong that morning, a family of starlings or finches in the huge cottonwood near the entrance to the hospital, where I would stop briefly beneath its wide canopy of shade. Fifty years later, I wonder if that tree is still there. It could be, couldn’t it? I know the offspring of starlings and finches return to the same tree generation after generation to birth their young. Couldn’t they—like a scene in a movie— have been singing that morning just as the sun came up? And couldn’t my mother have heard in their song the voices of us humans —her humans—as though my father, brother, and I had drawn ourselves around her bed, urging her, "It’s okay, you can let go now, it’s okay." This relatively new, unpublished poem addresses the deep sadness I've felt since my mother's death at 51 in 1970. While I've written about her numerous times since then, none of my previous poems addresses this particular irrepressible image of my mother alone at the very end of her life. For me, the breakthrough to the creation of "It's Okay" came when I was at home watching an all-too-familiar scene in a British film. I actually paused the film, pulled out my notebook and penned the poem's first draft. Previous ANDREA HOLLANDER is the author of six full-length poetry collections and has received number awards, including two Pushcart Prizes for poetry and literary non-fiction, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. www.andreahollander.net Next

Robert Okaji < Back to Breakthroughs Issue TRIGGER ALERT Robert Okaji 00:00 / 00:53 TRIGGER ALERT Robert Okaji Trigger alert: I'm dying. I am dying , and nothing will change that, not philosophy, not chemicals, not will. Not even the sky nor the ground it beguiles somewhere out of sight. Consider the horizon as loneliness, as line curved through eyeshot and smoke. As nexus of sun and diagnosis. Of relief and slumber, the pain in my wife's smile when she kisses me goodnight. I am dying , and I cannot picture the universe without me, or me, nonexistent, bodiless, simply not here. "Trigger Alert" first appeared in Stone Circle Review . I wrote the poem about four months after receiving a diagnosis of late-stage metastatic lung cancer, a terminal illness. It's one thing to be told you're dying, and another to admit to yourself that your being is indeed finite, that one day, not far off, you'll no longer smell the morning coffee, you'll not feel your wife's body next to yours in bed, you won't cheer for the inept Dallas Cowboys, you won't do anything, you will not be anything, you simply will not exist. Previous ROBERT OKAJI has late-stage metastatic lung cancer, which he finds terribly annoying. His poetry may be found in Threepenny Review , Vox Populi, and other venues. robertokaji.com Next

Lauren Camp < Back to Breakthroughs Issue POEM APPROACHING FOUR PAST TENSES Lauren Camp 00:00 / 01:53 POEM APPROACHING FOUR PAST TENSES Lauren Camp Later agrees to be the change of subject. On Thursday a fever adored him and then it didn’t, and now it does again. His soft bit of electric hair. His erasing. Two days more and fluid is swimming his lungs. How still we are. Invisible in the soon or very soon. The day nurse gets up, props him up, and up and up in bed, and hums and nests a white towel across him. Obedient oxygen accedes through a tube as a current and I want him to sing to me. A riff from Sinatra, a prayer. His breathing lands in even froth, the whoosh and pecking. I understand it. Or how long I have been making a life in his shadow. First day of spring and brooches of green. I speak close and loose, all calm exits versed beyond our past knots which still halve my mind. I make up the difference of his loyal not talking. I daughter. I squirm. I shape words into harmonics and within each scale a proverb. I watch his hands gesture. His mouth doesn’t know questions. Here I am watching some edge of being apart to being farther apart. A hot pink sun comes in urgent to land. It’s interesting to me to look through my drafts of this poem that deal with the end of a life, the actual final days or moments. I changed the title four times, looking to recalibrate my thinking. The poem went through a number of other revisions, too, though “past tense” was there from the start. At one point, I got more interested in exploring that term, and discovered there are four past tenses. This gave me a new way to consider a subject so close to my heart. Previous LAUREN CAMP served as New Mexico Poet Laureate from 2022 to 2025. She is the author of nine books of poetry, including Is Is Enough (Texas Review Press, 2026). www.laurencamp.com Next

Barbara Huntington < Back to Breakthroughs Issue SHIFT Barbara Huntington 00:00 / 00:41 SHIFT Barbara Huntington Sit on meditation bench something happens, doesn’t mind falls into abyss No words, no images bow to towering stone Buddha sit on meditation bench Above me the Buddha sits serene below the Buddha I bow something happens, doesn’t I am the one who bows to the stone Buddha I am the statue that crumbles as it bows to me mind falls into abyss I wrote "Shift" on a day when I was at a five-day silent Buddhist retreat in the desert in Joshua Tree, California, just sitting and meditating when I found myself both on the meditation bench facing the Buddha statue, and also as the Buddha statue facing me. I wrote it as a way to remember the time I felt my consciousness shift. Previous BARBARA HUNTINGTON was born in Albuquerque, NM and recently retired as Director of the Preprofessional Advising Office at San Diego State University. She has written poetry, children's books, memoir, and a handbook about how to get into the school of your choice, and her students who overcame tremendous odds to become wonderful healers as physicians, pharmacists, dentists, veterinarians, physician assistants, optometrists, chiropractors, and naturopathic doctors. barbarahuntington.com Next

Jan Mordenski < Back to Breakthroughs Issue YES, EMILY, HOPE Jan Mordenski 00:00 / 01:00 YES, EMILY, HOPE Jan Mordenski is something feathery but even you knew of its highly seductive danger. Like you, we tend to revel in the cloudless sight of the untarnished dove that lifts our thoughts then sets them down, so tenderly, in fields of whitening flowers. But you also knew that other call, that of the drifting hawk who inscribes the autumn air in mesmerizing circles— the sort we all made on grey hyphenated pages before we actually learned to write— that we need consider his unmatched sight, his claws, his deft ability to snatch up life pick it to the bone before we ever hope to set down our minds on paper. "Yes, Emily, Hope" was written after I toured the Dickinson house at Amherst. Her famous lines about hope had always cheered me, but her life and surroundings offered insight into the more serious aspects of writing poetry. Only after that visit did I begin to realize the great responsibility we writers have to our readers regarding truth and honesty. Previous JAN MORDENSKI was born in Detroit, Michigan. She is the author of the chapbooks The Chosen Pattern (Quadra-Project, 1988) and Blue Prairie of Darkness (Michigan Writers Cooperative Press, 2026 ). Her poem "Crochet" was published in Plainsong and in Ted Kooser's series, American Life in Poetry . poetryfoundation.org/poets/jan-mordenski Next

Nancy Takacs < Back to Breakthroughs Issue SWEET PEAS Nancy Takacs 00:00 / 02:00 SWEET PEAS Nancy Takacs Some would say just a noxious weed taking over that bare space where I put some seeds two summers ago in the meadow beyond my garden. ~ This year vines crazy with rosy heads, each blossom scored like two wings over labial hoods, seeds held under, hidden, waiting to drop. ~ I cut some from tangled vines for my kitchen table, to breathe their cool fire on the cloth embroidered by a Croatian woman, her flowers in purple floss straight-stitched, faces with eyes in between wide-open butterfly wings. ~ Her tablecloth swirls under my salad – the woman, her daughters and sisters living in that small wild country I flew to, its border fought over for decades, its past and its future haunted by torture and rape. ~ Each frigid winter our tour guide Marija said women embroider, embroider hundreds of daisies, sweet peas, bees, and Monarchs, prick fingers, careful their blood does not ruin the linen. Tablecloths like my Hungarian grandmother once made, just twenty, thirty dollars blowing on clotheslines on the bank of the Danube. A crucifix around each woman’s neck as they exhale cigarette smoke, some holding babies, bartering with us, begging us Buy another! to dress our foreign tables with their blossoms and wings. ~ I buy five with dollars they hold close, empty my suitcase so I can fit them in. How can I not fly them back across the dark waters of our terrifying world? This poem came to me long after a solo trip to countries near the Danube. It has gone through many revisions, but I always kept the ending. In a sense, the poem is connected to my love of embroidery that my Hungarian immigrant grandmother taught me. Little did I know at that time, this art was a way for women to make a living, and that the Hungary she left when she was sixteen, to come to America, was a scary place, easily taken over and over again. I learned this much later on. The embroidered cloths are emblematic of the women’s protection of their families, earning money to keep the wolves away, or if possible, to travel to “safer” places. They depend on tourism to live, getting their beautiful artful cloths into the hands of other women. The breakthrough comes as the poem progresses, a realization by the speaker that her privilege is fragile. She must support women any way she can. Dominion over women around the world is happening in devastating ways now in our own country, and sadly, it is imminent everywhere. Previous NANCY TAKACS 'S newest book, A Whispering Beetle (Broadstone Books), will be published in 2027. Her latest book is Dearest Water (Mayapple Press, 2022) . She lives in Wellington, Utah. nancytakacs.org Next

Mike White < Back to Breakthroughs Issue STONES Mike White 00:00 / 00:36 STONES Mike White The most torn angel came into town and we were dazzled and a little afraid His one shredded wing he held to his side like a secret and for all our asking he would not speak of God An angel fully broken so that when we finally led him up the road (gathering stones as we did) He trusted us like a serious child and asked again for nothing but water and homecoming “Stones” is an older poem from How to Make a Bird with Two Hands (The Word Works, 2012) that combines a sense of revelatory change with breakage. Previous MIKE WHITE is the author of How to Make a Bird with Two Hands (Word Works, 2012) and Addendum to a Miracle (Waywiser, 2017), winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. Next

Karin Anderson < Back to Breakthroughs Issue BLOOD DRAW Karin Anderson 00:00 / 25:59 BLOOD DRAW Karin Anderson My first whole image of my mother: my just-older sister Marti and I sit on our knees on the window seat at the front of our “nursery school” on the high end of C Street. Our teacher, a thick-shouldered woman with a European accent, has set us there to watch for our “mama,” and here she comes, walking slender and composed up the hill: knee-length white dress, white hose, white shoes. A stiff white cap with a black stripe pinned to her dark brown hair. We wave madly. We fog the plate glass. Our mother sees us at the window and smiles, happy to spot her little girls. Then, as now, she is amazed that she is an object of love. The teacher holds us back until our mama reaches the stoop, then releases us to run into her arms. My memory fades there, but I know we trekked on up the flatiron slope, a maternal hand for each of us, home to the basement apartment above the blue-green desert city. Our dad went to work too, but what he did there was unimaginable. He came home to kiss our mother. He threw us high and caught us. He’d put one of us in the rattletrap kid-seat strapped to his ten-speed to ride the steep pitches of the Avenues. Dad was either not here or he filled the atmosphere. But I knew that when our mother was gone, she was a nurse. She made sick people in white beds in clean rooms in long hallways get better. One day after work she told us about delivering a baby, following through with placenta, cord, and clean-up all by herself in the delivery room, because it just came before the doctor managed to arrive and wash his hands. She said she was fine, knew exactly what to do, but when the shift was over she had a shaky little breakdown in the parking lot. Before she was married, she’d worked with the Red Cross, traveling in the Bloodmobile from rural town to town. In that circle she was notorious for her aim—she could find a vein and enter it when no one else could. Also she once rebuffed a man who hung around after giving blood: he was waiting to tell her she had the most beautiful breasts he’d ever seen under a uniform. I don’t think he said “breasts.” Once, as she walked toward the hospital doors, she thought an enormous bird was flying overhead, but she looked up to see a grown man falling through the air. He’d jumped from a high hospital floor—my mother’s arrival was coincidental. But I believed this was the sort of thing my mother did in general: run toward people who dropped from the sky. It was kind of true. She had a way of being at the perimeter of disaster, as if she attracted it. She may believe so too, somewhere in the vault she won’t—can’t—open. It started young. Her mother died, dead winter night in their Idaho farmhouse, heart failure at thirty-three. Mom doesn’t remember her but recalls her father sitting at her bedside, pre-dawn, bearing the news. Mom was four. Her sister was eight. “Daddy” said he was going downstairs to call Mr. Kiser, the undertaker, and then she understood he wasn’t teasing. When she was sixteen she fell in love with the high school Apollo. His name was Keith, which sounded to me like teeth. She’d taken some abuse from local mean girls, so she was amazed that he loved her back. He proposed, gave her a ring. Her father and stepmother weren’t as thrilled as she’d anticipated. He came from a good family. An upright boy. Girls her age got married all the time. But her parents told her to go to college for a year. She was about to turn seventeen and had skipped a grade, way back, so graduation was near. She was a good student, a good daughter. She obeyed her parents and returned the ring. Next October she rode the bus home from college classes, thirty miles. She was eager to dress up for a date with her guy. She stepped off the northbound bus with her younger sister, crossed the train tracks on foot a hundred yards from their new home below town. Mom saw Keith’s car coming south, stopped to wait. Somehow no one saw the train, right there. It was just getting dark, light swirling snow. Aunt Karleen says the train’s lights should have reflected on the steel rails, but it came from the Underworld: no lights, no horn. The boy turned at the tracks. The train slammed into his car. Mom ran to him, half-ejected from the shattered window. His neck was broken and she wrapped her coat around him as he died. Our mom told us this story when we ran our hands over a pieced lap blanket draped over the back of our sofa: squares of burnt-orange felted wool. Pieces of the coat that comforted the dying boy in the smashed car. Her stepmother had cleaned and crocheted them together as a keepsake. When she was heavily pregnant with Marti (the first of us), Mom was walking across State Street in Salt Lake City, two steps behind an older man dressed in a suit and nice shoes. A car ran the light, hit the old guy, missed Mom’s extended stomach by a few inches. Mom watched in slow motion as he flew up, face to the sky. His glasses dropped at her feet and shattered. And then the man came down, she said, with “a sickening thud.” I could go on with this; my childhood was street-lit by other people’s disasters. My parents settled, three more siblings beyond Marti and me, in a small Utah town fifteen miles of no-shoulder roads from a hospital. Doesn’t seem that far until a kid spurts blood from the head after falling off a horse, or a jagged tibia sticks out of a sloshing irrigation boot, or a baby comes too quick in the house across the street. Or a middle-aged father of six is gasping through a deep-night cardiac arrest. People in our town knew the first thing, before calling an ambulance or piling a bloody mess into the car for a drive to the hospital, was to call Nadeene Anderson. … For all the blood, the only time I saw my mother saturated in it was the Sunday she backed the station wagon into, and almost over, my two-year-old sister Teri. It was the first time I saw my mother descend into paralysis, like other people did, in the face of horror. Where we lived, everyone went to church together. Neighborhoods belonged to the same congregation, attended meetings at the same time. Walking home from church with the girls my age—fifteen—was a way to free-wheel an extra hour of a waning weekend. Halfway home on long, narrow Grove Drive, my friend-enemy Melinda said, “Is that your Mom and Dad?” just before I saw our brown Ford station wagon coming back from driving the rest of my family home. I saw my dad honking the horn, scattering cars and people as he sped past. Incapable of discerning between a gag and a crisis, I waved as my parents blazed by. I laughed it off, maybe nervous, until our neighbors, following more slowly, stopped to address me. Sister Seeley said, “It looked like something happened to your little sister. Do you want to go to the hospital with us?” I got in, stunned, and was more shocked when I saw the station wagon in the Emergency drive-up. My father stood in the corridor, pale. He said, “Come sit with your mother.” I dissolved when I saw her, cowering in a dark sitting room, her gauzy dress soaked in blood at the cream-colored bodice, spreading down to muddle the floral skirting. In a weird way now this is just a run-of-the-mill five-kid family story of losing track of a toddler at the wrong moment: everyone thought someone else had seen her in. Teri wandered around to the back of the car. Mom backed out for yet another church meeting, and the bumper knocked the baby to the ground, a bad thump to the head—still gives Teri a look of gazing in different directions. The chassis went over clean but then the turn of the front tire scraped her face along the concrete until my father came out, shouting as he ran. Mom hit the brake, Dad picked up the bleeding child, held her as bait to make Mom move to the passenger side. She held tiny Teri, barely conscious, as Dad rushed them to the hospital. A story like this acquires many renditions, and we’ve all spun it in the decades after our little sister recovered. But I don’t think Mom did. Recover, I mean. I think it was the first irreversible crack in the stone. Dad cuffed it off on the other side with, “It’s hard to kill a kid,” but Mom never found a way to speak of it. We’ve come to understand that there’s a lot she will never speak, never release. Her mouth tightens into a lipless line, compressed at the corners. Primal, livid smoke behind the eyes. Fierce and strange as her people are, I’ve never seen this in anyone else—no one related to her, no one raised with her, no one who emerged from her. It's not just awful stuff like almost killing her toddler daughter. She presents the same livid blankness when her fine hair grows too long and “clings to her neck.” When she used to reach to brush my ragged teenage hair out of my eyes, restraining herself, I think, from slapping my cheek. When we folded towels the wrong way. She cloaks when we smirk at her idyllic portrayals of our father, the fairytale man who rescued her from the bleakness of what she also, in dissociated stories, portrays as her happy, glorious Idaho origins. … She returned to hospital nursing the year I went to college—partly to keep her license from lapsing but probably also because I was expensive. Marti was halfway through her two-year nursing degree. I was a flighty maybe-art / maybe-French lit major. Dad was doing fairly well as a small-town real estate guy but the enterprise was always up and down—another story but it called on my mother’s talents for consistency. She worked part time on the medical floor of the local hospital for less than a year before being recruited as Director of Nursing at a new long-term care center. It pushed the final decades of her career into geriatric care, and Nadeene slayed as usual. Wherever she took charge, state accreditors ranked her work as the best in the state, again and again. Like her house, my mother kept her institution spotless, efficient, calm. Her staff, like her children, knew what she expected and found it inarguable. She loved the residents in the pragmatic ways my mother loves—never sloppy, a little strict, undramatic. Everyone showered, or got a thorough bath in bed, every day. Everyone ate, at least a little bit. Everyone got dressed, all the beds got made. Everyone who could possibly get up, got up, at least for an hour, because it was good for them . I don’t think she particularly liked being in charge of things. She didn’t crave control over other people—not even her children. She was generally reluctant to call us out, resented confrontation more than the inciting crime. … Her career kept arcing as my father’s disintegrated. In their late fifties, our charismatic, gregarious Dad dipped into a years-long depression no one was allowed to notice. It must have been garish for him and my mother. He read Time and Sports Illustrated on the sofa in the open loft of their late-life foothill “dream house” while the TV blared ESPN. Sometimes he’d buck up but mostly he was in the loft, TV so loud no one could speak over it. Mom worked so long into her sixties I thought she’d never retire. She must have been exhausted, and fearful, and I know she was simmering over her children’s religious defections. The vulnerability made her more impenetrable. She came home after work to make dinner for her husband, clean it up. She went out to the yard with Dad to plant flowers, or pull weeds, or help with a little construction. After a pipe broke and their basement flooded, they worked together to clean it up, repaint, get it ready for Teri and her husband to move into the apartment they made of it. A lovely endeavor until Mom lost her footing on a stepladder, went down hard on the concrete floor, broke both arms at the elbow. Teri moved in, wiped Mom’s butt in the bathroom until the casts came off. … Our mother just turned ninety. We threw a big party for her at the condominium clubhouse. Dad died twenty years ago; they had a sweet final season after she retired—sold their house, bought the rather murky tunnel of a condo and paid for it, no mortgage. Took road trips to national parks, slept together in a pup tent on an inflated mattress. Spent a year teaching medical and business English in China. Went to Europe with Mom’s sisters and their husbands. I picked them up from the airport when they returned from Europe. Dad came down the escalator pale. Disoriented. Mom, in a state of denial that rendered her unrecognizable, insisted it was just travel fatigue. She had to know better, but the next day she drove him to Idaho for her class reunion, of all things. He slept in the back seat both ways. Marti, who became the fierce RN she was taught to be, insisted against Mom’s addled protests that they meet her at the emergency room. I’m not sure she’s ever forgiven Marti for that; maybe in some thread of magical thinking she believes that if the whole thing had remained unsaid it would have not become real. The ER, where Marti had once worked for eleven years, transferred Dad to the veteran’s hospital in Salt Lake City for testing. How it takes a full week to discover a melon-sized bleeding tumor in an unnaturally distended stomach, I don’t know, except protocol is test by test, elimination by elimination. And, maybe because Nadeene, who acquired her clearest contours when disaster hovered like a leering corpse, who managed mortal and immortal crises step by step, was suddenly amoebic. This isn’t the story of my father’s death. It’s a wincing glance at my mother’s living death twenty years beyond—another boundary fight as she clings to the diminishing phrases, anecdotes, and insistences that cloak her in being-ness. … She remembers her grandchildren’s and great-grandchildren’s names. She recounts a rote repertoire of memories that make church people coo at her spunk and charm. She knows her accounts and bills to the penny. She calls to remind my sister and me of upcoming medical appointments, and she’s dressed and ready to go when we arrive to take her there. Lucid. But there are eerie lapses. Ten years ago Marti and her kids took Mom, eighty, to a Fourth of July fireworks show. An older man a few family blankets over had a heart attack in the melee. Medics arrived to administer CPR and prepare the man for transport. Mom stood up like a sleepwalker and homed in, hovering unsteady over the medics, staring but saying nothing. Marti ran to her, took her arm, eased her away before anyone had to shoo her off. Mom followed, expressionless. She sat down contritely but as soon as Marti turned her attention, Mom paddled right on over again. Stood silent and entranced at the edge of the action, as if trying to recall something. A medic told her to stand back, but Mom held position, transfixed, until Marti reached her again. … Since then Mom has shattered both shoulders, one by tumbling backwards down her basement stairs because she insisted on carrying up a snowman jar. Again by falling hard on the asphalt as she walked the short distance to retrieve her daily junk mail. The falls were so brutal, the surgeries and recoveries so debilitating, I don’t know who but Nadeene could have bounced back. The bones in her hips (one artificial) and in her spine are rubble. The battle over her car keys nearly put me down for good. I told her I was terrified that she’d crash into a car in another lane, or worse, hit a neighborhood child. She said, “Well, sometimes terrible things just happen. We can’t control everything, you know.” Until just a few weeks ago she’s insisted on lurching along with her walker when we show up to do her shopping, or go to the drugstore, or to the many doctors (why she sees an ophthalmologist—two of them, in fact, when she’s almost completely blind, her irises silver as her hair, I do not know. She won’t let us take her to the dentist to tighten her lower teeth). But this month the pain has kept even her from clambering into the neighbors’ car for a ride to church, from coming along to “do her own shopping.” After the second shoulder break, our brother Tom said, “Look, we’re all bigger than her. We outnumber her five to one.” We assembled at her house—Tony and Teri took long drives—to lay down the law. She needed full-time access to medical care. We were there for her, always would be, but we couldn’t attend every minute, night and day, trying to prevent the next fall, the next terrible accident, the next internet scam, the next social media fiasco. Straight from the black hole: No. She doesn’t want to spend our inheritance. She “doesn’t want to be a burden.” She just won’t drink very much water so she won’t need help getting to the bathroom on painful hips. She has a nice supply of vanilla protein drinks, so she won’t need to wield a knife, or a can opener, or raise her stiffened arms too high to retrieve a plate that she won’t leave on the counter, or turn on the stove. She gives herself a “sponge bath” every morning although it’s clear there are places she can’t reach, or forgets to. She’s disintegrating in place, in her formerly spotless house she can’t see to clean. Watching it is my personal definition of Hell. … Marti ordered a hospital bed for her, bendable in ways Mom perfectly understands and knows how to operate, complete with a bubbling vinyl pad to distribute pressure across the skin. Handsome young men came in and set it up quick as a wink near the bedroom window. Marti had a wheelchair brought in, and a commode that fits high over the low-slung toilet. The commode: sure. The bed: Mom won’t even look at it, won’t even deign to say no . It just isn’t there. She sits in her green armchair, gazing over the invisible bed toward the window. She still prays out loud at bedtime: Please, dear Heavenly Father, help me to endure all that thou requirest of me so I may return to… … My mother is a high-def constellation of hyper-specific recollections. Behind the bright stars: dense velvet black—not because she’s ninety but because she became herself, at four years old, by learning what to configure and what to shroud. No memory beams forward from the event horizon, that winter night in 1939. Whatever Nadeene was or might have become before her mother vanished is erased. Here in her place is the child who shielded herself behind a tapestry of perfect compliance—good girl who did her chores, smart girl who skipped first grade in a one-room country school, resourceful girl who walked ten miles home along the darkening Yellowstone Highway in winter after a piano lesson, because she missed her ride and didn’t dare call her parents to come get her. That child became our mother. That child is gaining on our mother. Not the one who must have acquired form before the morning her father called Mr. Kiser. The child who is our mother is secretive and wily. She plays us against one another. She lies low, keeps a mild face. We’ve each been taken down by it at one point or another, or another, but there are five of us, and we love her, and up to now we’ve been able to spell each other off. Bring our separate kinds of best to her. A bedsore was not the breakthrough any of us wished for. Mom knows what a bedsore is, and she understands the cause. But she eats, sleeps, sits rapt for the next Masked Singer episode in that heinous green armchair, week after week, night and day, waiting for Dad to come shining through the window right there above the nice bendy hospital bed. After seeing that nasty mess, Marti, the sibling who deserves the most validation from the mother she emulates, called me to say she needed a change of guard. I drove down a few hours later. Mom greeted me from her chair, blank and benign. Didn’t say a word about the broken, festering flesh she was sitting on. Didn’t yield a wince, a grimace, a tear. … But it’s ruptured something besides the skin. She’s fallen into a simpler, more contrite childlike state. Last week we convened in her room, a couple of us sitting on the comfy hospital bed, to hear her wishes for resettling into assisted living. For leaving her home. She said, “Whatever you decide will be fine,” and then she gazed over our heads and breathed, light. … I’m convinced she’ll live forever, in incremental forms only she can inhabit. That tight cable of self-protection, the defiant thread of vitality she spins like a spider is all I’ve ever known as Mother. We’ll come together soon to help her move, and she’ll continue to drive us crazy and break our hearts. But nurses will surround her. We’ll make the little apartment look like her own house, with her own dishes and sofas, kitchen table and all the framed photographs of our father, of our father and her, our parents and us, enshrined. Her own TV, pre-set on America’s Got Talent. We’ll bring the monstrous green chair, because it’s hers. … Oh, wait. Never mind. She’s feeling much better! She’s not going anywhere. No. No. … This morning I drove the forty miles from my house to hers on ever-nasty I-15. She needed me to drive a check to the bank, bring back the cash. She wanted me to stop by WalMart, which I hate and she knows it, to buy a box of cheap apple fritters. We go to her, errand or none. We check on her. We sit out the excruciatingly dull but dangerous hours, because we love her. Mom was on the bathroom floor, leaning against the tub. She’d fallen backwards trying to pull on a clean pair of pants. Didn’t hit anything but carpeted floor but she couldn’t get back up. She guessed she’d been down five minutes. She’d already pushed her little emergency button, so I sat with her against the tub until the fire truck roared up. Seven calendar-worthy EMTs jogged in. She looked up at them, burly angels, nearly swooned as they picked her up—so gentle, so powerful, so handsome (she knows handsome, even blind)—and helped her balance at her push-along walker. They followed her back to that damned green chair, settled her in, and disappeared. I texted my siblings. Everyone called. The neighbors flocked in to make sure everything was okay. Grandchildren texted, told us to read their messages to her. Mom says she wants to die; she wants to be among the people she believes will greet her in heaven if only she endures what she’s been called to endure. But I think she’s also terrified—this woman who has forever skimmed the boundary of death, one corpse after another after another. She’s not the one who dies; she’s the angel of death. And times like this—everyone gathered, everyone swooping in, all the reassurance that she matters even though she’s a burden : she’s radiant as a four-year-old child, astonished that we love her. She wants to stay forever. Usually I measure a little cooling time for certain experiences before I try to write about them. I’ve written about my mother before—more detailed or episodic renditions of some elements of “Blood Draw.” But writing about her now, in the deep stream of this painful, dire yet deceptively serene season of her very old age, feels unruly and surreal. Previous KARIN ANDERSON is the author of the novels Before Us Like a Land of Dreams , What Falls Away , and Things I Didn’t Do , published by Torrey House Press. She hails from the Great Basin. Next