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
