Excerpt from the book Goodbye to the Orchard

Harm

Love means nothing if it does not mean
loving some more than others, Orwell said—
in his hatred of saints a hero of mine.
And this is how it is with love:

before he'd write "A Hanging,"
he spent months trying to describe light
angling through his blinds. And one day
he did. Over the next few days,

reading The Winter's Tale again,
I'll try and fail to keep my daughter
from replays of the soccer jersey billowing
as a boy drops into the SWAT team's arms,

two bullets in his brain. So afraid
of throwing up she only plays at home,
she trusts, at best, the germlessness
between the moment

she strips the wrapper off a straw
and the moment she puts it to her lips.
When hungry, she calls hunger
the belt that hurts her waist, thirst

a space that turns blue-green,
the color she loves best. Of the boy
who fell from the library window,
"he'll survive," I tell her. And he does,

unlike Mamillius, who whispers now
his sad tale that's best for winter
into his mother's ear, a secret we take
to be this play of jealousy itself,

which will kill them both offstage,
only to revive Hermione, but not her child.
That's the harm the play won't heal,
even as she wakes from stone, and walks

down to us; even as I overhear
my daughter whisper to her playdate,
sleep still unsettling her voice: last night
I didn't dream one dream. It was just black.