You know my husband. He’s the handsome, forty-something guy who looks curated from the pages of Modern Dad magazine. You’ll spot him outside the currently over-hyped café. He’ll almost spill his thimble of gourmet coffee on his cream-colored loafers, and one single frown line will appear at the corner of his lips. He’ll tug at…
The fridge don’t work. The milk comes out thick; when you shake the jug it sloshes heavy-footed breaking through the gospel of your grandmother’s duplex; her fridge always broke, and you always questioned why like why we gotta refrigerate in the freezer? Like why we gotta unthaw the milk for breakfast? The answer is because,…
Somebody says dig deep. Hunker down like you would in the onlybed you’d ever slept. With a flannel blanket head to toe, its color-hued fortonly you know, distorting the under-light. Venture back to that kingdom.It was not the fetal position; you had no need to hide. Markthe Noah’s ark measuring stick the height your daddy…
Make us sixteen again that February— the suburban couch of community smoke, or how, half-clothed on a wooden floor, we trace veins on our prickling arms. Ecstasy pressed with dolphins and pink ponies, sneak me out through the living room window into parking lots, under the hot sheet of a sky whose edges we don’t…
I’ve let men do all sorts of things to me in private.Around the corner from the Urban Garden Center chicken coop, My block quiet, sidewalk unlit, I let a stranger turn his face to me, beg“Pardon,” his piss slapping the crease between my building and stoop. The August night temperature matches my heat,So high that…
I shelved books. My boss at the library started with the pay scale at local fast-food restaurants and paid me a dollar less. Each morning I waited in the little room on the other side of the return slot like a monk in his cell, peering up at the mountain through his narrow window and…
The handshake haunts him. Those fingers continue to brush against his palm. The grip crushes his knuckles, yet surely there was also warmth? Even sincerity? Certainly, the flexing hold of those vice-like fingers had communicated some shock, some force. A sudden blooming of an inner light, even a sting of humanity? Rufus would like to…
I was standing on the packing line when I overheard it. Apparently, Bettie Page was in San Bernardino. The information came from Jim Wake, a man I’ve never particularly liked, but after hearing him swear up and down that the former pinup was actually around, I decided to join the conversation. “What the hell are…
What kind of school is this? Two little girls attend the hearing. We take a recess, and the children play in the courtyard. The girls had heard of their cousin’s cruelty, his sexual assault. The girls are chatter birds on a wire, feathers oiled. They twitter back at us: liar, liar. Only a few birds…
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