During the last days when we were waiting for herto stop being her, it felt like a holiday, a thrill in the air—rarely-seen relatives and friends coming to visit, everyone taking turns lying beside her, smelling her hair, tellingher she did everything right, was a good person and mother.When the first, faint rattle formed in…
I had come to the end of my formal schooling, my studies in history were a thing of the past. I was in history now, just another customer at the crowded candy store, new to town, the chilly evening before Valentine’s Day. We were packed tight as the heart-shaped boxes we’d lined up to buy, empty of…
is the indigestible triangular beak in a kaleidoscopewith other beaks in the belly of a sperm whale. Squid just prefer solitude. But here we are, wearingsquid headpieces, long iridescent tentacles down to our jeans, the two of us a rare squid family.My daughter hops over to two un-cephalopod-ed girls for hide and seek, and I…
for Mama belly pooched like a teacakeseventeen years old thrusttoward the congregation framedby stained glass deacon eyesthat nicked at her legs fixon her lips as she says i’m sorry months passthe young absent fathermumbles sorry my mamasays i have to go to schoolhe tucks the baby’s picture in hiswallet grins but she look just like…
Tell me again how when you met hershe was kind, she was capable, tell mehow you begat a pack of usthen took us to an overblown hillto ski, flimsy poles betraying a hopeabsurd in the face of the imminent accidents,the potential breakage. Tell mehow willing we were, young, to fling ourselves downsteep slopes, and no…
on the sidewalk. The sky was blue back then,the road empty. Today, a smoke cloud lingers from fires burning elsewhere, and when I lookout the window the sun burns a perfect red hole through the sky. Looking at it now, I can’t helpbut be taken back there, to the end of it, the cigarette butt…
Wisteria sinensis thick as a wrist, wrapped around brick, or pine, or some other living thing: it’s not suffocation if it’s also beautiful. It is not invasive if it also heralds spring. All winter you waited for the creeping vine to burst forth, earlier than trumpet. The purple of early bruise. The slow strangle of climb toward chimney or…
It’s beautiful to be glad to see a personevery time you see them, as I was to see Juan,the maintenance man, with whom it was always the samebrotherly greeting—each of us thumping fistover heart, and grinning, as though we shared a joke,or bread. I barely knew him. Evenings in clinic,me finishing my work, him beginning…
The cardinal at my window sings year-round, does not migrate or shed her colors, builds an open cup from parched grass and the hair she plucks from the dog’s bristled ear, cannot bear the sight of her own face reflected in the pane— is a red river, a cleric’s crown, an artery.
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