A flock of pink flamingos moved in across the street, and set up plastic people on the lawn. They’ve faced them out this way, hands molded to their chins, looking more like us as night comes on. Downtown, the waitresses are starving in their aprons; the watchmen get fainter by the hour. It’s…
Altadena-summer mustard smog sun all yellow as I have become this year I fear I am fat and wear a t-shirt when swimming childish the T-shirt clinging to me through summer the gut of August summers before when I was born smack for air this year the smack of water as I…
The world resembles a phantom vessel destined to sail but never reach a port. The kidnapping victim bound to a sawmill tries to loosen the ropes in vain as electric sparks shower down, unsure if help is on the way. Later in life he will apprentice with a sailor and learn to pull apart every…
I’m only leaving you for a handful of days, but it feels as though I’ll be gone forever— the way the door closes behind me with such solidity, the way my suitcase carries everything I’d need for an eternity of traveling light. I’ve left my hotel number on your desk, instructions about the dog and…
Sometimes when I’m asked to account for my weirdness—by those sympathetic enough to have not given up on me—I remember that Edward Gorey responded to the same request by remarking that the first two books he remembered reading as a child were Alice in Wonderland and Dracula, and so I offer my own origins story,…
The dancer’s dying words: get my swan costume ready. No one stirs from her bed. Elsewhere a hollowed pharaoh lies with fingers and toes capped in golden thimbles as a sandstorm thickens outside. A human-headed bird evacuates his body by day and at night returns to nest in his emptied stomach. The purpose of mummification…
I. It came in like a quiet boat at night. We still don’t know who sent it or why. Some days it makes us shake. We kept on cooking for each other and bathing ourselves. We looked at children but the music of Chopin always replaced the sight of them. In its coming, it took…
for Richard Bausch There was some sort of commotion at the end of the checkout line. Words had been exchanged, and now two men, one tall and wide-shouldered, the other squat and beefy, were squaring off against each other and raising their voices. Their shoes squeaked on the linoleum. The short one, who…
She accepts all invitations, asking me what else she’s supposed to do. It’s all you can do, I tell her, apart from staying home every night, which is where I was when she phoned from the party, the kind I used to frequent as part of my own new life, but no longer do. I…
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