I hope you’re glad I’d rather send you A letter by regular mail than a message Beamed in an instant from screen to screen. To fold the pages twice and insert them Into an envelope seems to make them More of a gift, to wrap them, to suggest I’ve chosen my words for you alone,…
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,…
What we remember most is our surprise. The gardener’s blood-thirst after family was lost to the fight. Asters went unwatered except by rain. It may not have been prayer caught in our throat but privilege, or cartilage, or birds. There are things we did not imagine: rooftops bloused in ruin;…
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…
Faces loom and eclipse under heaven’s attentive glare. Hieroglyph eyebrows. Burnished cheek. Dark scribble of beard. He wants to know: How far can you see into me by the roar of this morning’s light? The surface of his lips like the thirsty surface of sandstone or granite. Am I becoming statuary? he asks. Then let…
My dresses huddle in their closet. No histrionics, no tears. They’re undaunted, unhaunted, since you disappeared. Torture by laundry and mothball is all I can offer them, though it’s Christmas. And despite the holiday, there’s endless wrestling on tv. Is that your nudge to me: toughen up and roll with the punches? Here on earth,…
No products in the cart.