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…
At my first history class, the only students attending are the future, the present, and the past. As I step in, the future gets ready to leave, while the past straddles the present, handcuffing it, severing its hamstrings, and dyeing its clothes gray.
She did not play horsey on the hardwood floor. She did not neigh, nor did she whinny. She had some things she wanted to write down: something about her father and his guns and his alcohol and her trite love for him that never got to pale in comparison to the blooming chest-fire she would…
Don’t let me end up a mural on Bryant St. Sound of a cheap lighter heating a joint. Hiss like deep inhale from a fresh joint, large worries can be made small with a mouth. Large worries made small in Sunday’s mouth: aunties’ lips while they sing, victory is mine I dream and sing, victory,…
The Germans have a word for you—schnappsidee—an idea fueled by margaritas or shots of tequila or bottles of vino bianco or rosso, you know the ideas that maybe involve a road trip to Miami or California and you wake up in a parking lot in Mississippi or Delray Beach with a dead french fry stuck…
As a child, I hid to read your waves, nothing can lie in water. I wanted to peek through your wreckages, wrap your wind around my breath, I wanted to keep your sand, shells, and all your shores. The water’s reflection slowly peeled fear from my skin, women sang to the ships as if the…
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