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,…
Out in the open, there is a cowshed. There are the expected gaps and hornets. Here lives our story, where we used to meet— You smelled like hay, were always listening to some other sound, the buzzing of your own ideas chasing us down. You began building a staircase out of thorny branches, then a…
The cookies his neighbors brought by didn’t taste like pity— at my father’s house for the first time, after, the locks broken into, now new, when cross the street comes a neighbor, cookies shrouded in tinfoil, a plate I need not return. How long had the pair kept vigil out the window for someone to…
The grandmother was a bright, cellophane-wrapped hard candy of a person: sweet, but not necessarily what a child wanted. She knew it too. That sad bicentennial summer, her son in the hospital recovering from surgery, she and her granddaughter looked for comfort all over Des Moines: at the country club, the dinner club, the miniature-golf…
In the country of urgency, there is a language. —Grace Schulman I must have said something to the man in my confusion when I put my hand on his shoulder long enough for a cement truck to breeze by —it would have killed him— instantly, I think, when the light changes and its change falls…
Like grass in rain, my dead grow at an amazing rate. Meet me, won’t you, I’ve managed to lose the key. Death, you’ve outdone yourself. The lawn a little lake.
The dogs were all shapes and sizes, all colors. Black and white, brown and gray, they sniffed each other, growled, ran here and there, their paths crisscrossing. Alex and Naomi sat on a bench, their backs against the picnic table; she kept turning away from the river, away from the bridge and the cars sliding…
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