The Marriage is Survived by Both a Husband and a Wife Once I wrote a list to steel my mind What I should do if you kill yourselfHid the list at K’s house, preparing for the truth avalanching toward ustext my boss / tell our kids / fly in a friend /schedule more therapy / […]
Strangers at a Bar in Chicago on a dance floora man walks up to me says i remind himof everything about his sonhe pauses a bit when i demanda doorway to his memory—he was just like you he says againwe were so close yet distantin the neon colored light of the clubbodies stack in pairs […]
Twister The air was dense and daytime TV dragged itself around in circles. I wanted to go to the pool but hated going with Renee. She always taught me how to swim by taking me out to the deep end and swimming away from me as fast as she could. Renee was grounded for skipping […]
TKWLI I press play in the middle of the iPhone voice recording taken on that swampy summer afternoon, and that scene, emblazoned in my brain, re-enacts itself. I was twenty-three years old and feeling far too young. My sweaty thighs suctioned to the peeling black pleather couch. Swaddled in blankets, my dad’s skeletal frame occupied […]
I plant runner beans on the eighth floor It strikes me this is the kind of kindnessyou would do to someone else’s body.One month later, lung-shaped leaves have green-stretched and orange-scattershot themselves acrossthe balcony, panting with coiled pleasurein thirty degrees, carbon dioxide- drunk. Meanwhile, I have questions I don’t ask.Will we sink or swim. That’s […]
Waves It was the principal of my high school, or the assistant principal, a teacher, the chaplain, one of them who came to my class and retrieved me. As I rose from my desk, he or she said to bring my bag along, and it was at that moment, or maybe the one before it, […]
Destiny Is Destiny The recliner, that witherednavy dog, pancaked to accommodateEsther & her decay. Its adjustable anglesdulled the blades that sliced her guts. When the doctors said bagels are fine butonly plain, I heard the engine turn coldin my grandmother’s mind – Boy,these are some young doctors, and anyway,what’s a bagel without seeds? When she […]
The Aliens Watch the Mother Dream Tonight’s watching arrests us,makes us think. She bolts in bedsuddenly, her heart mammal, muskrat;she’s feral, a small bird with a smallerheart, she wakes, blinks several timesin the dark. We are silent, studying. Watch her there,as we observe what we know is languageunformed beneath her shallow breathing,notice her thought move […]
For All Mankind I assemble shrinesto the porous limestone; corpse of seaspongesundried, scentless; bonerigid around tunnels;ceramics, unglazed—women leak, that is our nature I, myself, still feel the tugof milk, pulling itself through my left breast when the cryof a child catches meaccidentally on a newsfeed weeping the fat ofmy own bodybegging, begging to servein ways […]
Roadkill My girlfriend snaps when she sees roadkill. She used to do a single clap, but that felt weird. Like I was applauding the death, so now she snaps. Just once. I add the sound her fingers make to the list of things I love about her. Decide to start doing it too (snapping), and […]
