I warned you that my grandmother wouldn’t like you and that you wouldn’t like her. The first time she saw me wearing a flannel jacket with my hair chopped off, she said oh boy here we go. That’s who we’re dealing with. The man she’s been seeing—he goes by “Hickory Frank”—is soft in ways she […]
If the Sun Exploded, We Wouldn’t Know it for Eight Minutes The summer we found the body, Mark and I got sunburned every day at the green pool at the back of the apartment complex and flipped his skateboard off the curb in the parking lot. We never smelled the salty air from the beach […]
Janiculum Hill, Rome All November, noon didn’t seem like noon:the light too yellow-gold and pressing long shadowson the burnished stones of every square. Even morningfelt late in the day, as if I’d already missed too much.And of course I had—around the city, marble columnshave cracked into boulders as ordinary as umbrella pines.Roads veer the way […]
🙂 When my order of slime comes in the mailI feed each textured batch its own dribble of borax and spring water. The parcel might as well be a newborn left at the door.We play Loving Family and Caregiver. We play Spa Day. I pull their puddy muscles and twist their pliant bodies at anglesthat feel good […]
Letters to the Museum Docent from One Hundred Years After I – Spring I moved in after the moss,found a place among the relics;made my bed in the vellum-soft interiorof some ancient canoe.I wandered, not so different from the visitors, from the rivers, the ones that paidto traipse about the shimmering halls of history,to study […]
Peach Pit The air conditioning kicks off sometime in the night, and Jonah’s gone from bed when I wake, my skin damp, aflame, like someone’s left the stove on all night and day. It’s the middle of June and the air conditioning is still out. Jonah will get to it when he gets to it. […]
The Other End of the Line My father told me, and so did my roommates later, that when he called my dorm-room landline on September 11th, 2001, he was already panicking. I was eighteen, having moved across the country from our rural island to Manhattan, an island of roughly the same size and shape, the […]
Vigil for a Bird Her fetal cheek should notpress against this grayresting place: the raw swirlof her alien flesh, droppedfrom the sky, is a small shock, exposedon the dirty sidewalk. She had no chancefor flight: her silver scatteredfeathers are little as the pinky nailsof a human child and shine like eyelashesin the sun, though the […]
All the Animals Lately everything feelsburdensome—the rifts in the pavement,the snow, which piles up in drifts my landlord never plows.My friend calls from Los Angeles,where his father has finished his first round of chemotherapy.In the light, my friend says,he looked terrible, placid and small in the hospital bed. When he walked,he dangled a bundle of […]
Sweetie Apple Death hissed over my head when, eleven, I gotan infection—MRSA, I think—and boils bobbedup under my skin like apples in a bucket at a carnival. I went to the state fair that summer, an infection—maybe MRSA—bobbinginside me as Mom drove us all the way down Illinois.I went to the state fair that summer, […]
