Split
I could split my heart on the anvil and put her inside…” — Anne Carson My heart, these days, is much too dense to break. It would require a difficult configuration of tools — mallet, wedge, hatchet, and maul — to make this kind of severance possible. It’s tough as those deep knots in the...
You’ll Love The Way We Fly
I’m in the galley making coffee. I try to look busy, not in the mood to talk or help. This is the fourth leg of a six-leg day, and already I’m tired. I immerse myself in counting and recounting stacks of styrofoam cups, tightening the handles on metal coffee pots, scrubbing the steel galley counter until...
The Nowhere Place
There is a stretch of Highway 63, about 200 yards long, that runs from the massive, wooden cut-out of Minnesota that says Thank You for Visiting the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes to a white index card of a sign that bears a timid Welcome to Iowa and the Iowa slogan printed in standard army-paint green. My older son...
Heavy Metal
To avoid the Hernandez brothers, lean tough kids with scarred knuckles, reputations, and stolen cigarettes, I cut through the back lot of the local body shop on my way home from school, passed slow by the twisted wrecks and starred windshields, awed by the hard lines and the graceful curves where Detroit’s finest met bridge abutments...
Into the Sierra de San Francisco
Mid-way up the Baja California peninsula the highway arrows through the Vizcaíno Desert. The Sierra de San Francisco rises bronze-gray and ragged in the east; to the far west, towards the Pacific Ocean, are the scattered pointed peaks of the Santa Claras, faded to a dusky lavender in the distance. The sand and the cactus...
What I Didn’t See in Cuba
I saw no looming billboards screaming in primary colors. No large images of alcohol, cigarettes, or women’s bodies. No assault of flashing neon lights. Both the landscape and cityscape were the colors of the earth–the greens of the countryside or the dusty grays, browns, and pastels of decaying urban architecture. Occasionally, a political sign jarred...
A Day in the Lab
I tutor in the writing lab; I like the one on one. I once taught a composition class, where many students held sentences awkwardly, and dropped them to broken pottery pieces. Everything was broke. Most of them were on a mode: their language was hip to a stuffy dress code: everything was tucked in. I...
![](https://brevitymag.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/FFU-013-MFA-Digital-Brevity-200x165-181009-Enders-1B.jpeg")