Things that Burned Right Through Me
Buying baby socks and three onesies and one newborn outfit on the way to the appointment where the fetal doppler told us you were dead, the same newborn outfit I now see in the box on the closet floor every day when I drag out a sweater. My parents driving across five states to stay...
All of It
The Start of It A friend of D’s wife G says there’s been a bad accident. “That’s all I know,” she says, “except that it happened on Rte. 15 and Laurel Road.” She lowers her voice as if she doesn’t want to be overheard. “D is in surgery right now as I’m telling you this....
So Many Tiny Stories
I’ve been hanging around a lot of elderly folks recently, very elderly, and I don’t know what to say to them. I am so much younger. The techs put me on a completely different treadmill way off in the corner (at one point I am actually running), and on totally different resistance settings on the...
Letter to a Half-Life
The memory comes fast and furious like an Alabama storm. How I used to drive you to the trailer park past Plantation Hills so you could fuck men for 35 dollars a pop, migrant workers that lived two too many to a bedroom. Were you even 18 then? You’d give me 10 dollars to drive...
White Camellias
The picture takes up most of the wall opposite my boyfriend’s bed. A photograph of white camellias in a crystal vase. I sit with my arms around my knees, naked under the duvet, watching the image through the conservation glass. He is downstairs making breakfast. When it’s ready he will call me down and seat...
The Night Chorus
Sure, sex is great, but have you ever clocked out of a waitress shift on a night when everything went right instead of wrong and at the exact moment you’re pulling out of the parking spot you performed laborious geometry to fit into someone yells “I love your truck!” and you drive home with the...
Girls Night
I am supporting the ghost of Jackie’s body and doing math. How many drinks has she had? Three? Four? We are curved together over the lip of the trash can as she empties her stomach. Her bile smells sweet and acrid, the desiccated remnants of a mango-pineapple mixer. A cup of ice water sits, sweating...
American Girl
It’s 6pm on a Sunday when Brittany calls to tell me about the mealworms. The mealworms, she tells me, are laudatory—an honor, a reward for good behavior in this, her fifth year in what will almost certainly prove a lifetime sentence at the Ohio Reformatory for Women. I stand in the parking lot of the...
Bridget Horan Rises from the Dead and Speaks Words Into My Ear
Práta means potato, child. Prátaí póir are seed-potatoes best planted on Good Friday. Iomaire is a potato bed and taobhfhód its own particular sod. Bachlóga are potato sprouts; millíní are the buds. Báinseog phrátaí is a patch of potatoes in bloom, lovelier than you might think. Caldar is a big potato. Práta préacháin is a potato...
Lonely As
“Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.” —Philip Larkin We lost Aela on a Saturday, mid-morning, four weeks ago. One minute she was running along the path we have walked a thousand times and the next she was gone. She was a puppy, four years old, and her last minutes on this...
Fallingwater
Listen: On this night, the house is an organ, an orchestra, a bellowing storm. The stream roars under a bridge and balconies, channeling into rapids, leaping and crashing onto boulders below. Nothing is silent this night—forested as dusk without sun, cloaked by rain that thunders as if to announce water is coming to find the path of...
Where the Komodo Dragons Live
You stand on the deck of a forty-four-meter wooden pinisi-rigged boat somewhere in the Flores Sea, close to where the Komodo dragons live. A brochure claims that this boat, the Ombak Putih, was made by hand in accordance with the traditions of the South Sulawesi people. You will spend the next five days on board....
start with a murder
of crows, they who first saw me at the retreat: week in ohio, more than a little death at my heels. five or six of them, the crows, perched and rattling a dead-top tree, cackled me down a good morning (returned). a good morning (returned) is what I am seeking; that elusive memory of sunup...
Mystery House
A door opens onto a wall. A window is trapped behind another. I visit the mystery house with my college boyfriend for an anniversary, but really, I am trying to uncover how I became a girl who accepts being torn down and rebuilt like this house. I am looking to solve the riddle where one...
A Barber is Born
Once upon a time, a young man with large ears and poor eyesight traveled from farm to city to pursue his trade. As his quick fingers spooled wet hair and snipped to the finest inch, a barber pole pulsed in the distance, spiraling him towards a spit-groomed future he was close enough to chase. The...
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