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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
Denial Dances on a Moonless Street in the Arms of Blame
the plague comes back — he’s trying to bolt the door — the trial exhausts him — to become water again he gambols with a bottle — come dusk the children ask — when will you return — there is an iron gate before the answer — a haunted house of mercy — an old friend survived a snowstorm —… Read more →
Of Feast and Family and Famine or Eulogy for my Grandfather, Redacted
Food and family. Famine. Semya i yeda. Golod. Голод. Семья и еда. All hunger when I think of Dedushka Senya. How his mouth opened as big as his heart and stayed open to command Babushka to shut hers or spoon-feed him soup or bring him tea or cut up his meat or read him the menu because putting on glasses… Read more →
Divorce Ranch
A let-go bunny pet comes to me, spiked hair between his ears. He wants a carrot, celery. I only have the ripped lettuce, slathered in mayo, I pull from my sandwich; I toss it down to him, watch him drag it backward a few feet then nibble. He sneezes, and I wonder if he can eat dairy. He can’t eat cabbage,… Read more →
Repeat the Enchanting
The cube of 5 is 125, expressed as a sum of two squares in two different ways: 125 = 10² + 5² = 11² + 2². Our family of 5 makes an odd-numbered cube: father, mother, son, daughter, daughter; or man, woman, boy, girl, girl; or Philippe, Jennifer, Benjamin, Daniella, Simone. * 125 is called a Friedman number in base… Read more →