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Alan at the Kirschbergs’

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…

The Martyr’s Motel

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…

Men

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,…

Because There Is No Ending

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…

About Major Jackson

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,…

You tell me

And every morning the sun comes up. And the pretty coffee in a cup. And a bird meowing outside in a tree. And, on the ceiling, the water stain of England made sadder by singing in a minor key. The size of a coffin, and full of bees. Shadow on a tractor, mowing the field….

Douche-Bag Ode

When I hear the young refer to someone as a douche bag, I want to say, You may have never seen a douche bag. They were red rubber bags, like hot water bottles, you’d fill it and hang it high enough so that gravity…I can’t go on, I see my mother’s douche bag, my poor…

My Dear Ego, Be

Clear, please, as a glass house. Ladled in plates, liquid form, silica, sand, dolomite, lime. Then be tempered, shaped, craned till you stand fastened to the forest floor, reflecting. And if a sudden garden struts up, rising in ribboned slope of pine and pin oak, laurel or fleabane, you can draw markers for their names,…