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...
Let There Be More Spices
1 In the beginning there was only absence. Of flavor. 2 The table of my youth was a darkness of bland, the burden of my mother’s type I diabetes baked into every surface. So as I stared at the jar of lard my new mother-in-law kept on the stove I felt myself hovering over the...
Fifteen Facts About Zebras
My granddaughter has a toy I’ve come to hate. It’s one of those touch-activated gizmos with dozens of animal sounds: tap a picture of a cow and it moos, pat a horse and it whinnies. But touch a zebra and it sounds like a squeaky pump with hiccups. That sound was so strange I asked...
My Mother Wants to Talk
I’m on the sidewalk in front of my next-door neighbor’s house, just returning from my morning dog walk, when my mother calls. I tell her I’m just getting home, but I can talk for five to 10 minutes. Mom says, I want to talk for more than five to 10 minutes. I say, Talk. She...
When I Was Someone Else
The white ceiling looks like heaven, I say to the nurse who hands me a paper cup of water and asks me again, maybe for the third time, to rate my pain on a scale of one to ten. Three, I say, which is true. For once the hurt is minimal. Nine is the number...
When the Scheduler Calls and Refers to My Upcoming Procedure as an “Emergency Colonoscopy”
The images that flash in my mind are not my grandfather’s last breaths, his frail wrinkled body giving up after cancer ate away his insides. Not my mother lying in a hospital bed after the surgery to remove nine inches of her diseased intestines. Not choosing the cheapest wooden casket and a burial plot near...
Kinship: One Week in LA
“Ki” to signify a being of the living Earth. Not “he” or “she,” but “ki.” So that when we speak of Sugar Maple, we say, “Oh that beautiful tree, ki is giving us sap again this spring.” And we’ll need a plural pronoun, too, for those Earth beings. Let’s make that new pronoun “kin.” ...
How Beautiful That Unruly Tongue Unfurls
Para tod@s that still spit back Caló, trilongo, dialect, jargon, pachuco slang, pachuco caló, “code-switching” (as some academics like to call it), or simplemente el lenguaje que nace del barrio is my favorite way to commune with those I choose to commune with. To make myself legible and illegible, and knowing that I have this...
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