Both Polish and Ukrainian volunteers working at the border express their solidarity with every person queuing at the crossing point.

how shall I hold them in my heart and not go mad from losses?

What if you were a teenage refugee on vacation with your parents and the lifeguard sat beside you, muscles and teeth shimmering under his fragrant choice of SPF? What if he asked you to come along, trailer the horses up to Hemet and ride with that top o’ the world slant all the way down San Jac.

82% of Ukrainians believe they are going to be victorious in this war.

Never in previous generations have Ukrainians been so united, so strong and so focused.

The glass through which I look is thin and breakable. Sometimes I can faintly see my own reflection.

White, extra-large half-slip.

An anachronism now. Who wears a slip under a dress anymore?

The woman who used to be the girl in the triptych mirror is standing in her bedroom looking at her husband’s sleep apnea machine placed on the floor next to the bed.

Joseph doesn’t beat Wanda. With his fists anyway. He’s shouting up the stairs at her as we sit on the bed listening to her mother’s records and trying on make-up I brought over.

She seemed a bit better that morning, but we kept the appointment, expecting to be sent home in the sheeting rain with a floppy bag of expensive food and an orange tube of pills.

Eddie’s dad was a psychopath who delighted in cruelty to his children and their friends and one night…

Sometimes I still see myself as a refugee, a small child with thick black hair that people like to pet. I grew up in America, the pinnacle of the modern West, but my reality was another world.

My son is still with me. We are sitting in the grass on a warm summer evening, looking up, when the star-burdened sky . . .

I play in the forest near our apartment building assigned by the American military ten years after the war is over. I am building . . .

Your bony shoulders, red pepper, tell me you’re ready to go wherever we take you—