What We’re Good At
It is morning, winter solstice, the darkest day of the year, and you are lying with your boyfriend on his bed. You are from New Orleans, but you are now in Pittsburgh, where you came for a job and, where you fell in love a few months ago. There is snow on the ground and...
Hometown
I’m sitting on the front porch of the house where I grew up, smoking a cigarette like a teenager. It’s dead quiet, cloudy and damp. I watch a single, fat blue jay screech madly at a yellow cat on the grass median strip in front of the house, flying back and forth from one tree...
The Water is Rising Pleas
Put a grown man on his roof, put in his hand a house painter’s brush and he’ll paint these words for the helicopters to see. His friend lays asleep next to him, a water bottle in his hand. A damp American flag, shaped like koi, curls against the wind. Open the door and the water...
Party for Flor Pequeña
The mothers sit in plastic lawn chairs clinking together brown bottles of beer with limes squeezed into the tops, periodically pulling light green pieces of pulp from their lips. One of them turns on the radio that is lying in the grass next to a stack of magazines and a clay ashtray. The mothers start...
Driver Ants
The night we arrive in Uganda, my mother wakes to the sound of rain, not a storm, but a steady slap of drops against pane. She rolls over, her body weary from the plane and the children and the jetlag. Although we are at the top of a hill, windows flung open to catch a...
Hum
The car purrs along at 72, engine noise lost in the whisper of wind and the music. I love to hit the Volvo’s cruise control and turn up the stereo and roll along alone, checking the mirrors, the gauges, letting my thoughts go long and loose, knowing it’ll be hours on the road and that...
Spinning Down
On that perfect Caribbean afternoon, while my spouse napped, I had paddled out to a shallow coral area to snorkel. Alone. I knew better. The water was quiet, the coral gorgeous, so I swam beyond the shallow area for a better view. Without any warning, a wall of surf, instant and rogue, picked me up...
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