Surf
Peter says, “I can’t sleep in this relentless surf.” “You’re the one who loves ritual and repetition.” “Ritual, yes. But this pounding is relentless.” We are sitting on the screened porch of our friend Fita’s beach house, Alligator Point near Tallahassee, watching the sun slide down from cirrus to cirrus in a blaze of lavender, hot...
What It’s Not
She said, “Draw what startles you awake.” I held my good pen in my non-dominant hand and drew a jagged circle, almost like barbed wire. Still, I tried for symmetry as I do in all things. All things? Yes, or at least compositional balance and complimentary colors. If I could dress myself with the...
That I May Not Thirst
Birds bend around wind to hoist their bodies in the air—she does something similar. She unfurls, all red lip and ease, says, Here I am. This woman before me knows what it is to claim skies. I am not yet there. The church I grew up in taught me to fear God and then...
All Hat, No Cattle
All hat no cattle, C says as we drive through Lubbock, Texas. My endometriosis has flared and we’re on our way to Fun Noodle Bar when we pass the boy in the Ray Bans and the fake cowboy hat, his upper lip bristled with a patchy 20-year-old mustache. The boy drives a pick-up truck,...
Decade
I sit on the pool’s edge and watch my daughter swim. She dives underwater then surfaces beside me. “Momma,” she says, “I was trying to see how long I could hold my breath…what it would be like to drown but couldn’t. I popped up for air.” I kiss the top of her swim cap. “Your...
Bone & Skin
1. I tell you I’m getting a tattoo to cover my scars. Some kind of tree, perhaps, the branches reaching across one scar, the roots wrapped around another. A living thing. An ancient bristlecone, a saguaro, a juniper, purple with berries. “You’re allergic to juniper,” you say, and I nod. I do not ask, “But...
Against an Apocalyptic Vision
In those falling years, we hiked often to one cabin or another, all crumbling into ruin. We’d eat our lunch with legs dangling out an empty window frame. I always liked when we could open a closet and see the bright bird and flower wallpaper that had once decorated all of these gray and yellowing...
Weeks After the Pulse Nightclub Massacre, I Hold Miguel’s Hand in Los Angeles
—and I like how it feels, his hand, a little thick. The way it spreads my fingers open to make space for itself. How we have similar heat and feel familiar in our touch. His soft skin. How in between our palms we hold a feeling. Words we haven’t yet said. —on a slow night...
A Lesson
I learned how to cook, really cook, when I was with X. Sometimes when I’m dicing aromatics, my brain will conjure him. I have to stop what I’m doing when this happens; I’ve nicked myself more than once, even sliced off a good part of a nail. My memories of him are like fat carpenter...
Anna Maria Island
Did you know that the common housefly, like the one circling the room now in a wide, counter-clockwise circuit, hums in the key of F? It’s true. They come in different sizes, of course, but their bodies scale so that the vibrations of their wings correlate to the pitch intervals in F major: F, G,...
His Apple Pie
Once, a man I loved left my dog alone in a car with an apple pie. The man had baked it himself. As our friends climbed from the backseat, the man took the warm, saggy-bottomed aluminum tin from my lap and slid it onto the dash. It bumped the windshield and blew a swift feather...
Thereafter: A Cleansing Spell
Use this spell in the aftermath of an assault on the body for physical healing and survivor’s justice. Be patient, as this process is ritualistic in nature, and therefore, time-consuming. Use the two days you call in sick to complete it. You will need the following supplies: Five-gallon bucket with lid Two gallons of bleach...
Body Puzzle
Across 1. The color I dye my hair. The color of nitrile rubber gloves. Three bowls of thick dye, painted onto my scalp until it burns. My hair grows and pools around my shoulders, over my breasts. This is how I own the ocean. 3. The outline of an area or figure. It is hard...
Slumgullion Pass
I struggle to keep up with my husband Jack as we whack our way through smothering brush somewhere along Slumgullion Pass between Lake City and Creede. My lungs are working hard in the thin mountain air. Alferd Packer, the man this area is best known for, weighs heavy on my mind as he has for...
On Going (Back)
Some beer-soaked dance floor in a bar outside Boulder. I’m twenty-eight or twenty-nine, wild inside a pocket of bodies and an I’ve-gone-away mind, lifting a sweaty bottle of two-buck beer above my head like a lantern. He’s watching from the crowd’s edge. Since he moved in months ago, I devise ways to disentangle, disappear. Distance...
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