“We believe in the unspeakable, at my father’s church. Or rather, we believe in the unknown, in speaking unknown tongues. We call it the Holy Ghost, the spirit that fills us and guides us toward redemption. My father believes in ghosts and I believe in them too, although I’m not convinced that mine are holy.”

—Live Reading, Epilog, Columbus, Ohio (2019)

“What don’t we inherit from our ancestors? Intestines that seize from cow’s milk, from the density of certain Ukrainian meals. The loneliness of the empty schoolyard. The urge to curl into the darkened corner of a room and not return to daylight. Somehow my grandmother survived. Somehow, a hundred kilometers away, my father’s parents survived. And my mother, my father, weak and longing for nourishment—they too survived, and carried across the Atlantic a longing that I carry now, soundless and severe, a pain in my gut—at times, even, a wish to disappear.”

—Live Reading, Mother Tongue, Columbus, Ohio (2019)

“If we had known what would happen that summer, my uncle’s final cell phone signal tracked to the bank of the Spokane River, maybe one of us—there were so many of us there—would have walked over to him and held him, too. Instead, I scratch at the pantyhose I’m wearing under my black dress, and, hungry, exhausted, I get into the BMW and wait for my aunts to finish comforting my mother, wait for the final procession to take us to the restaurant, a buffet of bland food and tasteless coffee to mark the end of an unremarkable walk toward death.”

—Live Reading, Young Writer’s Workshop Faculty Reading, Columbus, Ohio 2018

“I can’t help my mother find her brother, but I do find bones. After the first, a fox femur, half bleached by the sun, half perforated by the earth, I keep finding more, the way my students learn a new word and unearth it from all the books that follow. I see bones on my walks from the office, on my morning hikes into the mountains, on my evening runs along the creek, slivers of ribs and half pelvises gleaming dry in the grainy Wyoming sand. I lay them out on the dashboard of what used to be my uncle’s car and the sun bleaches them further, tibias and fibulas and femurs lined up like uncrossed tally marks in the detective’s notebook.”

—Live Reading, Mother Tongue, Columbus, Ohio (2018)

“My parents dilute their Russian with a village dialect of Ukrainian, and my siblings and I speak that hybrid language in the shape of English vowels and inflections. When the new immigrants overhear us at the Russian store, they shrivel their noses, as if our words smell like something dead pulled from the water.”

—Live Reading, Mother Tongue, Columbus, Ohio (2017)