Photos by Morgan Lieberman

I can’t quite describe the ache I feel as I study the faces of the women in Lieberman’s photographs. Though I don’t know them, and they live in many places across the West, they seem familiar to me now.

I wonder, can you know a place by learning its stories? Can you call it home? Bending over my nature journal, I want to believe that you can, that this is one way to love. Earth, body, sky. I belong somewhere.

At the end of her freshman year, my 15-year-old daughter, Talia, came to me and said, “Mama, I don’t know how you did it.”

Image: Sandra Dal Poggetto, Understory, 1993, ink on paper, 5.5 x 7 inches. Private collection.

Claret cup cacti announce themselves in everything I write. This surprised me at first, but it shouldn’t have. I’ve been pierced more than once by their spines. When in bloom, tiny vermillion bouquets dot the dry ground. They are everything I aspire to be.

Art by Richard Smith

The day after Alex came home from hospital, they found a crow on the ground.

It was a warm mid-June day in Montana. The school year was finally over – 10th grade for Alex, and sixth for Talia.

It was in early March of 2019 when Alex was admitted to residential treatment for suicidal ideation and self-harm. Although it had been a relatively mild winter for Montana, snow covered the ground. Every weekend trek we had made from Missoula to the state capital Helena to see Alex, we had worn our bulky coats.

Some weekends, Alex was allowed to check out for a few hours. We would get pizza or wander up and down Helena’s small downtown strip, or explore the ceramic statues and broken teacups strewn about the grounds at the Archie Bray studios. These were the things we did on the weekends when the nurses said Alex was stable enough for short outings. Many weekends, though, the nurses put a red wristband on Alex. This meant outings were forbidden.

I ran north and left the sun behind. I left the cacti and the vanishing rivers, too. Winter lasts for eight months in the north. I hate being cold. But drifts of snow and low, grey clouds press down like a lid to insulate us. A freshwater sea runs under our feet — a vast aquifer that sloshes and swirls.

Image credit: Muaz Kory

When I reach a small tree, its brown leaves still attached and stirring in the light breeze, I test their strength. I grasp a handful of leaves, one by one, pinching them between my thumb and forefinger before tugging them earthward with a quick jerk. Of the leaves I pull, only one comes loose. The others are strong, still connected firmly to the slender limb they hang from. So far, we have not had much snow this winter. Although it is January, in Montana the paths are muddy with small patches of ice and snow here and there.

The diaphragm felt guilt in admitting defeat. What would happen to the body if it just laid down and took a forever nap? Would it be accused of murder? It had never heard of a diaphragm being accused of murder, but there was a first for everything. An accusation would surely lead to conviction. A life behind bars. That wouldn’t do the body any good, but the criminal justice system further breaks what is already broken, so such an outcome would be in keeping with history.

“Howls float up from the houses beneath me and I stop on the path, listening, as a flood of howls swells and I realize it must be eight o’clock. Howling time.” 

Illustration by Carmen Johns

In 1984, on the edge of Highway 518, my family lived in a bright blue building with neon yellow letters looping across the front to announce its name: Snack Shack. Tourists whipped by, winding up the pass to Taos for skiing, and locals took the low road to Peñasco, a town of roughly one thousand people at the base of 10,000 foot peaks.

My parents paid $15 a month for rent.

The Snack Shack was what remained of an old set for the 1977 motorcycle movie, Sidewinder. The film crew had slapped paint on an old, crumbling structure that was half adobe and half cinder blocks. It hadn’t been lived in for decades.

The light has been returning for two months, but inside their cells the women can’t tell that the sun has just set. There are no windows. The yellow-orange of fluorescents light the halls. Kristin and I meet with the women twice a month, buzz into the detention center from the sidewalk, and wait for the guard to come. We pass through the metal detectors, turn in our driver’s licenses, and pause at three different bolted doors as the guard buzzes each of them open.

The light from the lengthening days makes it feel like anything is possible — for me, for the women in the jail, for the world. 

The fifty-two-quart cooler is filled to capacity with bags of frozen green chile. On this three-day journey of over 1,200 miles, from our small hometown in New Mexico to our new home in Missoula, Montana, I have made it my priority to keep the chile from thawing.

To read the essay, purchase Tin House Magazine, Volume 20, Number 4 (The Final Issue)

Though my heart is free, my hands, if they stray, can be dangerous.

To read the full essay, purchase the summer 2019 issue of Indiana Review

*This essay was reprinted in the anthology “We Leave the Flowers Where They Are,” edited by Richard Fifield.

I take my two-year-old daughter to the children’s museum where she likes to pet the corn snake. I watch from a distance, stroking my pregnant belly.

I met her in early January on a sidewalk in Missoula, Montana. It was only nine but it felt past midnight, the dark and cold thrumming along my skin, the stars dagger points suspended in the frozen air.

In “Disembodied,” we see a writer investigating the natural world, her personal history, and the nature of violence and destruction in its many forms—environmental destruction, the destruction of ones own being as a means of survival, destruction in order to save those we love. She weaves together her own story with philosophy, with journalism, with science, with history, with mythology, with poetry, with linguistics, and the results are lyrical and powerful. This essay is a fine balancing act.  

--Jaquira Diaz, judge of the 2016 AWP Writers Conferences & Centers Award for Creative Nonfiction

For a longer excerpt of "Disembodied," read online at the Kenyon Review. For the full essay, order the print issue of the Sept/Oct 2017 Kenyon Review. 

"There are reasons that the most impoverished communities are the ones where trash clogs the rivers and collects in curb-side gutters. Some days I am quick to point my finger. I mutter about the irresponsibility of my neighbors and scowl at the litter covering their yards. But I know better."

[An essay] about America's culture of waste and what our garbage tells us about who we are and what we value. --Rumpus editors

A few considerations for people unfamiliar with the cultural attachment to grass.

"I became fascinated by whiptail lizards after I came out. Whiptails are native to northern New Mexico, but I never took much notice of them until I was divorced and learning how to take care of my two small daughers on my own." 

"Missoula comes in shades of greys and blues and greens. Muted colors. Soft on the eyes. It is not a place with red crumbling arroyos, golden yarrow, crimson King Cup cactus flowers, or purple and orange sunsets setting fire to the sky." 

"Read all the parenting books you can get your hands on. Recognize slowly that every so-called expert refers to their own experience, their own cultural norms, and to studies with questionable methods. Chuck the books with your new insight that all children are essentially guinea pigs." 

For the rest of the essay, order the print Summer 2017 issue of Camas Magazine. 

"We felt cool there, in the dark, wearing our ripped up jeans and flannel shirts. If Kurt Cobain hadn’t died two years prior he might have been proud of our middle-of-nowhere New Mexico grunge crew."

"I stared hard at the tissue box in defiance. Three “always” responses didn’t mean I had been abused. I had been raised in a feminist household. None of this applied to me."

"When I had parked and removed the keys from the ignition, I twisted around to look at Talia in the backseat and upon seeing her serious and beautiful 7-year-old face, I began sobbing."