for all the horses I didn’t get to ride the years of my girlhood in Montana. I wasn’t Terry Jo, the last child and only daughter of a rancher whose spread lay deep in the sheepland steppe, forty miles south of our little town. Terry Jo, whose mother, like all the ranchers’ wives, moved to…
The graveside prayers and eulogies over, A stray dog came to bark at us among the headstones As we trooped back over a hill watching The wind lift the widow’s skirt higher and higher, While the undertaker ran after us, Waving an umbrella someone had left behind. We couldn’t help but think of our friend…
Before Edward stood and pointed his camera toward the table, Kelvyn hadn’t noticed the way that the glass top held the islands’ Bible-blue sky and the fat white puffs of cloud. That Edward noticed made her happy (she knew that the pictures he’d shot of her back in their adjoining cabins were of an entirely…
Sometimes I read pages of books without retaining anything. I am thinking about my own drama and caesura until I come across a word like creosote, which seems familiar but I have to look up. When I go to the dictionary, I realize I am wondering who will bury me and where, going over the…
I am sitting next to you & you are not there, you’re a frameless heat, mass of ruptured air. to be clear, you are the spit & liver it takes to be human & I want it & I think you want me to have it all, but I know what it’s like to be…
Every evening after the network news, Dolly and her son watch “Jeopardy!” The habit dates back thirty years, to Bruce’s moody adolescence. Naturally shy, he was prone even then to sudden, awkward displays of confidence. “Jeopardy!” let him show off his worldly knowledge, which for a boy who’d seldom left the state of Maryland—who wouldn’t…
There are feelings I would rather not have, so I avoid certain types of texts and images— particularly pornography. Sometimes I think this makes me a better person, but, in actuality, it also makes me a coward. Am I so afraid I’ll enjoy some ridiculously sexist fantasy? I’m not sure what I’d do with the…
The last tug at the sleeve lets her blouse fall off shoulders to breasts that have never seen a lover, she shudders, shakes so hard I touch the bones inside the song of this afternoon to stop the loud way our fear of us rattles her in the flutter of bugs so fragile they can…
I was in Florence, Italy, when my father died. It was Easter Sunday and I was staying with old friends, the Marchettis, in their apartment near Piazza delle Cure, a quiet neighborhood on the north edge of town that you entered from via Faentina. We hadn’t gone into the center for the big Easter celebration,…
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