Miriam Bird Greenberg

I grew up in rural Texas, the daughter of leftist Jews involved in the back-to-the-land movement. From an early age I began attempting to communicate with the dead; I wore the silk schoolteachers' dresses of ancestors a hundred years dead of diphtheria, and collected honey that dripped through cracks in the ceiling to sweeten my tea. The goats were born every spring, their mothers mouthing afterbirth from their whorled stomachs, and died bloated of cyanide threaded through daffodil seeds they'd eaten in the front yard by fall. In the meanwhile coyotes called their names in a chorus from the creekbed. I got older, and by age thirteen, time had begun to function in a mappable, linear way. I stopped bringing sweethearts home after my mother bestowed a frozen owl, wrapped in its caul of frost, into the arms of an early girlfriend. I ate mulberry leaves. I listened carefully for voices in the dark, frozen in fear or in chill (the house, a century-and-a-half old, was hard to heat). Shadows that moved on the wall at night were of leaves in the trees as they pulled--shuddering--back; the dead remained silent, and I turned eventually to other pursuits.