Article

Treasure

1846 My sisters loved my father and always came to his defense. They said he was brilliant and that much was true. He was generous with his family when it came to material goods, and my sisters never went without, at least until he lost everything we had. He was a notable man named John…

Hamper

As sunlight or darkness fits itself around lamp, table, or mountain, silence stitches itself around hopes, thoughts, and words. Some hear it the sound of their own speech coming back from when they are dead. Some find it summer-cool pillow, winter wool coat. Some tack their names on its door and step inside. And if…

Dead Fox

We pretended to know nothing about it. I withdrew to my childhood training: stay out of swampy undergrowth, choked edges.? This was around the time we were too cruel to kill the mice we caught, leaving them in the Have-a-Heart trap? under the sun-burning bramble of rugosa.? But moving up the trail, we caught a…

from Burning Summer

They had started out too late. This is what she tells herself as she sits in the dark on the old screened porch and drinks a glass of wine. Terrible wine—white, at least a week old, at room temperature. It had been sitting, recorked, in the box of last-minute things they’d brought up with them…

Mop Without Stick

I am on my knees again, mop without stick, over old fir trees turned into flooring. A thought stood once in the middle, near the cookstove, left heel and right heel. Left hand and right hand, I wash around it. Thought without handle, thought without hands, without lemons or Serengeti. One breath, another, one corner…

Tiny Struggles

He managed the walk to Main Street, three blocks, two long avenues, and didn’t worry about how he looked—a big whitehead poking along the sidewalk. Things were getting better, not that Tiny knew the absolute right moment to leave his house, because out the back door his garden merged with theirs, and the neighbors might…