in that realm, a man of straw can pass for a man. sleep him in the woods on a horse’s skull—skull so he dreams of echoes, horse so his heart learns to gallop. unlearn him the language of his starving mother, pull his shoulders back, and he’ll swagger. he’ll see a blooming meadow and think,…
When you were torn from me, summer gleamed like glass and teemed down in hot, silvery, perfect beads. And I could not bear to be touched. Not by the silk of skin I was swathed in, not by the rain which shattered, then regrouped, unharmed. Rain everywhere like the touch of a man…
the way the light does the cells inside the skin or as the water does deep inside the vein of the leaf, alone in the oblong tub my toe turned the tap, newly wed to this interior. It was the year we touched no one but each other night after night, season after season, and…
This was the summer of kitchen stove burners full of tin foil, my family’s women circling esfand smoke around the house. Our neighbor Mike was still a decade away from raping a woman. I still knew nothing of the pocketed jewelry, the body left for dead. I still rode bikes to…
Olivia curtailed her sleeping hours to fix what’s wrong some weeks before her trip. Okay, she admits on the page, it’s been a one-month slog with VISA through salons. Last night, anonymous friend and she, in lace, race to a corner where someone shouts out a window, “Congratulations.” They call back, “We’re married but…
Coyote howls outside the patio door. 3 a.m. and someone’s out of bed turning on lights, checking windows and rain starting to sound against the skylights. When we stirred the creature vanished. Isn’t that the way even here at the cusp of the arroyo? Just as when the lizard with its stumpy tail…
First a warm blanket and a voice called Joy. Then oxygen, a faint smell, and a finger monitor. A stick at the wrist and pressure, a clear-coil tube. Then a voice called Tan and something pumped. And a thick paper packet like a vest with an eye hole. Then nothing but every-colored wallpaper…
In poetry, our winner is Margaret Wright, for her poem “Accidents.” Of the poem, poetry judge Paige Lewis says, “Is it possible for a poem to be a ghost? From the description of liminal spaces (the stopped train, the empty roller rink) to the uncertainty of the ‘accident,’ to the poem’s desire for us to…
One afternoon last week, I was sitting at my kitchen table, doing an online search for Bobby Bocelli. What came up was an entry headed: Robert A. Bocelli, 54, journalist, novelist, play and screenwriter. It sounded like an obituary. My second feeling was shame and guilt about my first feeling, which had been a flash…
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