I was not appointed anything so linear as a form like yours, nothing so costly as your eyes—mine are little departures, stained where yours had been basins, washed over white.…
Trigger warning: depictions of sexual abuse You bury your past between thighs open up secrets from graves disinterred lives saying kill the beast which does not look like you…
“You maybe want to get a cocktail?” Michael asks, his head is hanging out the bus window. We are both a bit overheated, already drunk. He’s pointing at this dive,…
October 31, 1976 It was just after two in the morning when I finally stepped outside the bar and paused to light a cigarette. Exhausted, I leaned against the wall…
The winter of 1992, the phone rang off the hook and wild dogs got into the peacock hut. Harriet read the last real winter had been in 1986, when the…
There is a scar on your inner thigh, that looks like a bear, and when I traipse my index finger too close, you go rowr. Always Ray, always. I walked…
for lillaree she was getting her doctorate on the last island she owns in my memory’s receding fogbank. it’s been thirteen years and i’d always figured she’d be dead by…
Listen: it’s raining ash. The one holding his nose tight in blueish kleenex is your dead neighbor’s only certified son, heir to eleven thumbs and a language made of…
I. My paternal grandmother lived in a brick ranch, with white trim and black shutters that didn’t close, in a small Ohio town. Her house was two doors down from…
She is serenity. A portrait fixed with a face like the Middle Pacific; cold and beckoning. As the frosted dirt cracks beneath my small feet, beneath layers of dead corn…
Those fireflies spark in the hum and burr of twilight, when our legs begin to itch from the day’s rambles. Chiggers and tall grass have left their mark, a tattoo…
I was three years old, the youngest of three, when my father passed away in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. I have no recollection of him. Any remainders are memories of memories, or…
James Madigan got out of the car and looked around. To his right he could see the imprints left where children had frolicked and carved out snow angels. The hollows…
It’s not just that feeling of escaping something that opens up your chest, or the closure that lends rhythm to seasons of life: after spring, the long slow breath. After…
Three hours and ten minutes before I can leave. Outside, it’s your favourite time of day. Those early hours that neither truly belong to night nor day when the upper…
undeath is in creation / and the degloving of hands / digging up of pale yellow talisman / kiss of moonlight through the willow branches / fade / d /…
My grandparents’ kitchen was indelibly turquoise their laminate countertops hosted black currant jam parties berries picked, cooked, poured into paraffin topped jars and plunged into hot water baths to save…
Harvard College Reunion, Class of 1958 Adrift between symposia and seminars, a drizzle of reverie on Bow Street, aimless nostalgia graying in droplets of fog. At the corner of Arrow…
I remember the way February looks after midnight— jigsaw lines of houses, small front yards the rain crawling along the ground, turning to ice speaking blacktop cracks into existence. I…
I see it there knowing full well its cycled presence through daily passing. The wide green expanse a guardian canopy. And think, I’d like to lie out under the catalpa…
There is this small river shaped like a gutter near my childhood home. It runs along a centenarian railroad, made of dry wood (with funny knots in it). Walking the…
Here, a village road, darkly quiet, winds under sunset’s opal sky, wisps tinged turquoise green, rose, tint the low horizon. Here, a country lake, old sailors dock weathered boats, dusty…
I crawl into your photograph, inch open the cupboard behind your shoulder, pull out a chipped glass kept for summer root beer. I hate your diet kind. Tastes like how…
Loneliness has found me In the stillness of the night I reach to touch your hand… But your heart has taken flight. This lonely place was once a home So…