Growing up in the South is like kicking a mule to feel eternity in your bones. Or kicking a scarecrow, and calling it a mule. Or running your fingers over the rusted, abandoned blade from a tractor in its eternal rest, and calling that a mule. You’ll call anything a mule. Lace doilies on…
we call them, that week at our rented beach shack, with smiles equally, let’s admit, tender and cruel. Heart, cancer, rope— they flourished without them. Designed tiny houses. Protested often. A month in Guatemala. Book clubs, movie groups, wine tasting before the play. More friends than either of us, solitary couple,…
In the piles in the backyard he and I sat in June’s pumped-up sun, half-blinded, sifting through rocks and crystals, winter’s lump and strand sprouting thin green leaves, lobes that would turn to vine and squash and yellow in fall’s sideways light. He grabbed fistfuls with clumsy fingers, smearing them on his mouth, wanting to…
who drowned in my two fingers, denied the bitter sweetness of a black- berry and nearly surrendered to the meat of a melon, but considered, mostly, the craft of thirst or death and tongued itself goodbye. oh, gentleness. oh, small brown float of a life. what news should I…
Come see our siding glimmer in the sun. Our knuckles stung in bleach. All cobwebs gone. Come see our daffodils like little gods, these yellow resurrections born to nod again in April breeze. Our vase-staged rooms are dustless as a baron’s desk. We groomed them free of poetry (my books in bins teeter attic stacks)…
During the last days when we were waiting for her to stop being her, it felt like a holiday, a thrill in the air— rarely-seen relatives and friends coming to visit, everyone taking turns lying beside her, smelling her hair, telling her she did everything right, was a good person and mother. When the…
I had come to the end of my formal schooling, my studies in history were a thing of the past. I was in history now, just another customer at the crowded candy store, new to town, the chilly evening before Valentine’s Day. We were packed tight as the heart-shaped boxes we’d lined up…
is the indigestible triangular beak in a kaleidoscope with other beaks in the belly of a sperm whale. Squid just prefer solitude. But here we are, wearing squid headpieces, long iridescent tentacles down to our jeans, the two of us a rare squid family. My daughter hops over to two un-cephalopod-ed girls …
for Mama belly pooched like a teacake seventeen years old thrust toward the congregation framed by stained glass deacon eyes that nicked at her legs fix on her lips as she says i’m sorry months pass the young absent father mumbles sorry my mama says i have to go to school he tucks…
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