Along a familiar hiking trail I recognize agave, sage, the summer-blooming yucca, and sticky monkey flower. * As if they might be learning a new dance, elders plant their feet on steady ground, gathering wind in their arms to move cloud hands. * Returning home tonight I avoid crushing a snail that casts a scant…
for Linda Gregg Safe in the light along the bank Being in believing No name Only being On the bank radiant and blank Safe watching and seeing On the brink Of the light Blank No blame in being Waiting then breathing in being Seeing Singing Let my voice …
After the death of his wife, Loring began giving away things for free. His sister-in-law worried it was some kind of “suicide thing,” as his brother Bill put it, which only showed how little they knew him. Loring wasn’t suicidal. If anything, in the four months since Gloria died, there was a new kind of…
The room cannot feel its arteries stuffed with animal fat from the insulation. Cannot hope to alter its mouth and eating is not a thing that it can do well. The room hasn’t taken a bath since 1987, but there was a slight wash in 1992 bestowing the room its perforated body. The room cannot…
Alan Zimmer had been staying at the Kirschbergs’ for a week when he saw their daughter in the elevator at Brigham and Women’s. She was in a wheelchair. Alan, behind her, recognized the yellow kinks of her hair, and the dark roots that cleaved to her part. He stepped forward. “Jenna! What are you doing…
They’d traveled one by one on their knees beneath the earth to be gathered at the station to be given robes and haloes and official papers. And a bus ticket each to the roadside motel in Ohio that held the reservations in their names, where those who’d been slain before them were waiting. Can these…
We’re in the middle of it, in the middle of the backyard barbecuing steak and chicken. Telling stories with our wives and girlfriends away, red and blue psychedelics, Coors Light and breasts falling into our mouths again like basalt cliffs into the sea. Jeremy says, I did CPR on a gorilla once. A girl gorilla,…
we are not asked to see, the ridged folds of the black walnuts, fallen, come veined as any mind split from its skull, leaching what little parades as peace. Rot and wet. My right instep, sneaker’s underneath, crushes a once greener skin gone brackish at the cap. Looking up, the branches meet in an arch…
If, in the 1980s, you had been a resident of one of those communities associated with the term, “urban renewal” might occur to you as double-edged with its bureaucratic optimism, and the implied whitewashing—easy as calling a do-over—of recent history. And if parts of your community were within the expansion radius of an ambitious university,…
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