Back Home: What Ails Them
Gout when there is too much meat, “sugar” when there is too little. (Irish potatoes, white rice, corn bread, light bread, chalky lima beans.) Karo syrup blood. Being “odd.” Arthritis. (Mama calls him “Arthur” because she’s known him so long.) “Sorriness.” Back pain: lower, middle, and upper. Advil like M&M’s, then codeine, Lortab, Oxycodone, Oxycontin. (“Mama, what does that doctor… Read more →
Hunger
Every person procuring sex is confronting God’s abandonment: all we want is to cushion the melancholic prick of the ephemeral – the way tits are more reminder than they are taste – before long we must succumb to nature’s unbridled authority. My clients come to me spiritually vacuous and searching for something – anything – to believe in. It is… Read more →
Bua Means Paternal Sister
Taiji’s gone. Buried in Detroit. At night those shadow-men flicker ‘round little white factories, their steel peeing smokey grease of our town, not of us. Can adultresses straighten their starched, funerary gowns? I lick her’s hem, wrinkled. Honeyed chunks choke my teeth with glee, we Hindu wives arrange our deaths.
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 to Avoid or Survive a Crocodile Attack
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 →
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 →
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.