'Plums for Months': A memoir in vignettes

Zaji Cox looks back on her childhood in a polished collection.

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It seems fitting that Zaji Cox grew up competing in gymnastics, a sport in which the spotlight is on you for maybe 90 seconds at most. The prose pieces in her new book, “Plums for Months,” are similarly taut.

Her words balance on memories, such as that of Hunter the feral cat:

Hunter walked on steps weighted with Earth connection, each one leaving behind a note that resounded lower and deeper than most cats.

They pirouette through a homework assignment about the five senses, in which she ponders what she wants to write and then realizes she doesn’t have the room to do so in the worksheet’s confining boxes.

And I’m not quite sure how to get it into words that people will understand; I have a feeling my senses work differently than others’ do.

They flip the narrative in a piece titled “Boys”:

I don’t daydream of kissing crushes underneath the play structure or cuddling in the back of the school bus. … I daydream instead of rescuing them, pulling them aboard my play-structure ship from a grisly fate in a hot-lava sea…

They spring high in defiance in “So What?”:

if the gaps in the corners of the house are growing wider,

if the septic tank needs tending to more and more, and the downstairs bathroom is still sinking into the ground,

As with gymnastics routines, the brevity of these pieces is deceptive. You don’t sit through the countless hours of training and effort. You weren’t there for the backstory, the years of becoming.

You see only the moment in the spotlight, when the words come together as a polished whole.