translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones You wrote to me about a tame pet hedgehogwho fell in love with a scrubbing brush. Shut inside four walls he’d found that special someonelike him and not like him, otherness and kinship. How hard he pattered around it before he understoodthat otherness has an advantage that cannot be overcome. And…
I’d hear a sound off in the treesand follow it for hours.I touched the bark of an old maple and watchedthe ants take my hand. Still in the front yardmy mamma is cleaning trout,like her life there is the gutting,the clipping of fins. I sliced my leg open on the fence leadingto this wildness, two…
I hope you’re glad I’d rather send youA letter by regular mail than a messageBeamed in an instant from screen to screen.To fold the pages twice and insert themInto an envelope seems to make themMore of a gift, to wrap them, to suggestI’ve chosen my words for you alone,The very person whose name I’ve written…
Pillsbury Avenue, addiction row—a whole street of mansions close to downtown, long ago abandoned as tax write-offs and turned into treatment centers, methadone clinics, job centers, halfway houses. I parked behind her building, 1950s four-story stucco with steel-framed windows and rusted white metal awning above the front door. Across the street a tortilla factory, Mexicans…
If I said, Your smile glows with empiricism.If I said, You are hydrogen, heliumed by the sun. If I said, You are both key and prison,claw and feather, absent hum. If I said, Your breath is opiate paradox.If I said, Your voice is thin as time. If I said, Your hands sweep through clotsof memory,…
What we remember most is our surprise. The gardener’s blood-thirstafter family was lost to the fight. Asters went unwatered except by rain. It may not have been prayer caught in our throatbut privilege, or cartilage, or birds. There are things we did not imagine: rooftops bloused in ruin;the enduring, flammable night. There are things that…
Wratchford slaps a folder down on her desk. The blast of air sends a piece of paper drifting to the floor. She tries to ignore it, but I can tell it bothers her. I bend over to pick it up, but now I can tell she didn’t want me to do that, so I release…
We look at each other until the power goes out. Until our eyes become sad hills in an apocalyptic sci-fi thriller. The sound around us is closer to the waving of a wet flag than a fist meeting an enemy’s jaw. In the distance, the lake erases the last of the windsurfers, leaving behind only…
“I had to get away from her,” my husband whispered as we lay together in bed. For thirty years, I’d heard only his sharp, flinted words, the stories about his mother no more than a few terse sentences—“She sacrificed me to my stepfather. She let him beat me. She beat me too”—his resentment flaring on…
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