The meadow hears everything—or does it? Perhaps the short-haired girl up to her knees in grass is the one who takes it all in. She’s skin and wide eyes, alertness and hurt, as if she can remember the fireflies sparking on some future night, the voices saying I want to be like this forever. As…
They said that’s where Lulu went, that was the smell. Not rats. Fifty years go by. They say Yes. They don’t change their story, it’s true. A low cement block fence around the house, a collie dog bark, four kids. Not collie, but collie dog, Howdy as in Doody, The Stooges on someone else’s TV….
Looming over the little sewing kit and the miniature bottles of shampoo and conditioner, I am a giant— a king standing before the royal mirror in an enormous robe of terrycloth. As a sign of my benevolence, I will forego coffee from room service and check out early before my tiny subjects arrive to wash…
for lunch he made her sweet peas with milk and butter her favorite— and after school he taught her lessons in French kissing until the grandmother caught her snuggled in his lap fingering combat ribbons and stripes the smell of aftershave and tobacco safe and after all what did she know when she was pulled…
Like a voice drifting across low damp ground it is always there. I have whole files on the subject. There is nothing more to know. My name hangs like a sign outside an old inn, a painted figure for illiterates, blown to and fro. Last night I had a dream of finally…
We meet day-plain and inches away, faces facing off in a garden, kissing closed kisses, solemn, bone-dry, and exquisite as the leaves of our sweating faces glisten, sheens giving back each tree’s green. My greenery grows untoward, branches burst windows, menace doors, what sky is wide enough to house me? Breath…
Two and a half weeks after I was born, on July 9th, 1958, the plates that make up the Fairweather Range in the Alaskan panhandle apparently slipped twenty-one feet on either side of the Fairweather fault, the northern end of a major league instability that runs the length of North America. The thinking now…
At the moment when you stop mid-step and look into my eyes, as if at a ship on the horizon, blue sea and sun, and light drains out of the sky and your face is lit by its own sun in the far-off land we will sail to in the boat whose mooring line you…
Chicago Stories Alewives The year the alewives were washing up on the shores of the lake and their stench rose up from the beaches so that even when you couldn’t smell them anymore they stank up your memory. Newly dead they were a silvery blue. In the sun they were like hundreds of mirrors. They…
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