Beak
Before we knew herons, we knew their sleep– white, craned, blue pitch of reeds against the earth. Mud. Pebbles emptying from their throats like tin. Hail that shook the water. A group is called a siege. They wait, or drag each other to the banks. One with my name. One with his.
Mushroom Hunting: A Villanelle for the End of the World
1. I want a lover I can survive the end of the world with. And I mean that literally–when society and abstraction fail, I want someone who knows something about water and growth and soil, who knows how to live like an animal, according to the natural laws of the world, and not just the ones men make up for… Read more →
Grooves
There’s a girl in my class with vinyl palms, whose hands look as though they have been pressed into a melting record. So what? she shrugs, but she does it with a smile because her gloves are full of music. After lunch, we sweep the classroom, and the scritch scritch of my brush-in-hand is interference to her palm psalm. In… Read more →
How a Story Unfolds
Just breathing in distant interstate exits, we amble along this road together, flipping up mailbox flags in passing. Farmers’ clothes are scattered on the lines. Traveling dashboard stereos cry over pastureland.
Road Runner
So my kid is watching Saturday morning cartoons and says to me, Road Runner looks dumb, and I stop answering work emails that I shouldn’t even be reading because it’s the weekend, and I mull this over and ask her, Sweetie, what’s so dumb about Road Runner? and I hit pause on the remote and think about driving through Tucson… Read more →
Assumption
La Virgencita appeared on a Tuesday afternoon, voice rasped like a smoker, definitely not the honeyed tones I’d always imagined. Too many hosannas, she explained. I’d wanted an apparition, a bird perhaps, or maybe an image emblazoned on cloth or a statue that wept. What I got was an omen in sunglasses, a fountain of immaculate advice. She kept vigil… Read more →
House in the Desert
Pink adobe walls and buckling roof. The stacks of prickly pear on either side of its small frame. The door and windows in perfect alignment like a sad open face. I wonder who lives there, and if it is a woman. And if the woman has fits of anxiety. If she sobs and carries on over the smallest thing. If… Read more →
A Story You Know
Winter when Lily and I take a bath together. Our bodies side-by-side, foot-to-hip. You can make it sexual if you want, but it isn’t. Michael is in the other room reading. The bath water is almost too hot. Lily leans her head against the wall, her hair trailing in the water, the gold beads of her earrings glittering in the… Read more →
The Most Historic State
Each year, approximately twenty new state-shaped plaques are erected as part of the Ohio Historical Markers program. Adorned with gold buckeyes, they celebrate nationalist narratives of settler colonialism. The first one I encountered was on a visit to a small liberal arts school. That plaque commemorates the first Episcopal bishop of Ohio, “Pioneer in Higher Education.” My girlfriend at the… Read more →