What were you listening to, Great-Gramma, down at the lake, that Saturday nite when you felt you couldn’t breathe? Not those lo riders waxed and raring, the way souped-up carburetors suck oxygen to drag along the strip, your gulping breaths, gurgling, ineffective. The ambulance fetched you. In the hospital, they lopped off your thick braids…
In this story the cockroach is the man, the curtain my girlhood, the creamed corn spilled by the mother wasted familial love, the father’s zealotry a metaphor for emotional blindness. In this story the radioactive dinosaur is the man, the city of Tokyo my body and the metro tunnel, well, you know. Fire is…
floating at the surface of the oil the fish is weightless and ready to come undone between your teeth. I got to call Dan Henry, he gone want this while it’s hot. Mo rises to find her phone as if gravity has no authority over her body, lifts the antennae to summon this husband…
Ugly is pretty generic (there’s enough to go around), a name flung from the mirror I duck, but I hear what it says: Your living is complete defiance. All of this was foretold in my history, shaped by storefront living in my latchkey world. My ugly is alive like a plague bred on…
Here’s how I explain it: my body has had an umbrella open for the last 910 days no, it hasn’t rained at all but I like to be prepared & I like to be untouched / I might carry this un-superstition with me forever yes, like a child yes, I was terrified after the…
Still it feels shitty, filling a grave. To raise dirt by the spade-full, just piling it on. Our task: plug a hole that holds my best friend’s dad, pack distance between a corpse and all it cared for. That the rabbi refers to it as a final kindness—a mitzvah—seems amiss, like a door…
It was summer. I was small. My uncle plunked me into his pickup to keep him company on his run for more beer. I was glad to go. He was a loud, belching man who killed bugs for a living. My father’s brother, with three golden teeth. I recall the calm sun, yellow and smeared….
A certain holy, the black nylon straps becoming funeral dress. My body, a white shroud draped over yours. We make two definitions of the word bury & let them both lead us to forget. Your old name, thrashed down my throat. Replaced with spitslick & stiff mythology of rubber. My breath scented like a car…
As a child I was radiant. The land grew irradiated corn and roses, tomatoes large and abundant. Swallows and catfish carrying the isotopes into the water and woods. The sun rose each day, while the shadows of trees concealed government laboratories where my father worked. I grew up listening to the tap click of the…
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