This affliction--hope--is so cruel and stubborn, I believe it will kill me

You show you care, you die.You show you fear, you die.You show nothing, maybe you live.

Inside my head I carry: my baby goat, my baby brother, my ama's face, our family's future. My bundle is light. My burden is heavy.

Look. I have a strategy. Why expect anything? If you don’t expect anything, you don’t get disappointed.

I imagine you working on me as an algebra problem, reducing me to fractions, crossing out common denominators, until there's nothing left on the page but a line that says x = whatever it is that is wrong with me.

Instead, we linger over a luxury that costs nothing: Imagining what may be.

Ama wipes her hands on her apron, looks up at our old roof with new eyes, and lifts the baby from his basket. She twirls him in the air, her skirts flying around her ankles the way the clouds swirl around the mountain cap--her laughter fresh and strange and musical to my ears.