The boy is taken with the forest, the musk of wet bark – bold, consuming, and the sunlight, gold mist stealing through the canopy. When the forest breaks day with its many songs, its chirps, and croaks, it calls to him, like music longing to be heard. Over the roots and through the low-hanging branches, […]
I stopped recycling on the day you left. You were the one who wanted to save the world, not me. I was the anthracite-fueled cynic with a penchant for sullen women with placards and eyes brown and impenetrable as the frozen autumn ground. Your placard read ‘Ozone before Oligarchy’. The details of how we became […]
1. Alligators have four-chambered hearts This similarity alligators share with humans, birds, and the engine of Darryl’s car. The latter of which is hunkered in the shadows of Roy’s Clunk N’ Junk after it shuddered to a stop on SR 44, miles from the nearest municipality. Roy’s is on the main drag of a one-stoplight […]
On the day Grandmother swallowed a piece of the sun, the carnival was in town.“They’d just elected Eisenhower,” she swears. “A do-nothing. Creepy looking, too. Bald, sun-spotty. That Normandy heat sucked the collagen right out of him, poor thing.”We nod and smile and keep on using the bedside commode and the bars of the home-hospital […]
She’s replacing a panel, hands ungainly in stiff gloves, intent on each twist of metal as she screws it out of its hole. This is how she was trained: to see only the metal glinting in her helmet’s light, to ignore the massive hull of the space station over which she floats, and the infinite […]
I stand on a glacier, snow cutting my face like shrapnel, and drill a core deep into the ice. It reminds me of our argument the night before I left: like a blade twisting into my heart, you said. It’s below freezing and the wind is picking up. The monitor on the drill rig beeps; […]
Bruce and Bok Choy, the crooning lovebirds, wish to be alone with their Kleenex box at the base of their cage. They make Liz feel like the third wheel while she sips her morning coffee. They are all flutter and feather and strips of People Magazine ripped into jagged ribbons and stuffed into Bok Choy’s […]
Simultaneously, she is seven years old dressed in a white sweaty nightie and forty-seven years old covered in sweaty snow pants, a down jacket, and her husband’s blue long johns, the ones with shredded ankles. This can happen when an illness bridges across a lifetime; both sicknesses occur on different planes, different paths, interjecting, interloping, […]
For Hungry Ghost Month, Sister and I put out bowls of persimmons, plums and freshly steamed buns filled with sweet red bean paste. Mom locks the doors and windows while we sit on a yoga mat, playing Stratego and fighting over the last Hello Panda biscuits. Once a year, we stay indoors. No walking to […]
是你的就是你的，不是你的就不是你的. That’s what my mother always told me. What is yours is yours, what is not yours is not yours. Once, she backed her silver 1994 Honda CRV over a man she didn’t want to love, but he came back to her on his knees, with subtracted teeth and a titanium spine but the same […]