This poem threads the Idaho foothills that surrounded my growing up and the loss I steeped in even before I was born. It asks questions about lines—landscape, inherited grief, family history, that dash on a tombstone, the roads on a map between what it means to love and know a place as home, what it is to leave and what it is to return.
Rebecca Brock’s work appears in The Threepenny Review, Rust + Moth, Whale Road Review and elsewhere. She won The Comstock Review’s 2022 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Poetry Contest, judged by Ellen Bass, and the 2022 Editor's Choice Award at Sheila-Na-Gig. Her first chapbook, Each Bearing Out, is available from Kelsay Books. She reads for SWWIM. You can find more of her work at
Quisque iaculis facilisis lacinia. Mauris euismod pellentesque tellus sit amet mollis.