a delicate box. The child inside it. It’s okay to not think about how the child came to be in the box. It’s okay to focus solely on what the child offers: the sound of fireweed bending in wind, yesterday’s pages torn from their binding, a small hand. Yesterday there was no sign of the…
“What’s for you won’t go by you,” he told me, the great, recalcitrant songwriter so heavy-browed with doubt and kindness. I was eighteen and had taken a Greyhound from New York to Nashville to find him, my corduroys indistinguishable from my self. That whole wolf-on-skates year his music had saved me, made me feel something…
I found a boat tied up at the water’s edge, rocking, rope frayed, oars banging in their locks. At home, you never knew what might happen. A surprise a minute, they say. In the distance dark clouds, no trace of the other shore. It might have been wise to have brought a compass and life…
We’d only just begun to scratch the floors with our own furniture, unfold the box flaps and hang the walls to look like our walls in the old apartment: familiar faces, fruits. Then we heard it, the long scrapes in deep grooves overhead. It came from the devil’s peak, after we’d turned the bedroom into the…
Like a pomegranate, I wore my garnets quietly. Nude lip, beige tongue. I took the shape of clouds passing by. I was a tool for divination—you used me to find water & blamed me when I drank. We dreaded you together. Still, I kept my smile on, even when you hid the key to my…
Just there, deep in shadow, the peeling paint of an old door to a carriage house behind untrimmed cypress branches, a shade somewhere between turquoise and navy wrung by rain to namelessness, a color we can no longer locate on the spectrum, the lost blue of tenderness and sorrow overlain with exaltation, a door we…
His beard’s still dark but a little grayer. I, too, have a gray hair or two twisting through the dark ivy between my legs. Honestly, I’m surprised he recognizes me standing up. He looks well, fit, his smile as generous as I remember, all those times on my back staring up at a faded picture…
Sometimes, we let ourselves believe we’re talking to his ghost. Sometimes, we think memory, its rhyme. How long can you stay afloat? my sister asks when he admits to paying his ex-girlfriend’s rent again. He doesn’t care that she’s seeing other men and avoids his calls— doesn’t care that he owes back-taxes and hasn’t held…
Where are the flying stars of my childhood? Evenings lit like a glitterball’s sparkle against the night’s dim walls. Their absence is like aging: one less pulse each year. I want my childhood of darkness bedazzled again with shards of light— my tiny lighthouses, my suburbs of surprise— where the shadows of dogwoods and crepe…
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