Before she brought me forth, I wish she’d known how much more she’d need to take away, the mom I knew marooned in Alabama. Moves to MS, FL, and TN, and she can’t return without a flat tire, financial fiasco, old lovers making pilgrimage who could undo the curse but instead scrape off the lonely…
We found the cardinal near the bird feeder: stiff, eyes fixed, wearing the brightest red coat of any bird I’ve seen this summer. With a shovel I lift him from the dirt, show him to my daughter who gazes upon the orange bill, the rigored body, leans in close enough to touch. Was it raptured?…
I search online for causes and find that most are tied to loss. A child, a parent, a friend, regret. For me, the I is lost. The most awful things happen hours after a session, not another for a week or two. The Therapy Curse, I call it, covering the years I’ve lost. Sometimes I…
He’s wearing two watches, one set to the local time in New York, the other in Gaza. In a café with friends, waiting for his tea at the round table, and whenever his eyes fall on the dial of the Gaza watch, he can see the kids of his Gaza neighborhood running in the alleys,…
Neighbors smuggle the sun through tunnels beneath the houses. The smoke of bombs dropped from the F-16s has covered the city’s sky.
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…
No products in the cart.