I’m on your bed right now. You’re playing some niche game— your latest obsession. The room smells like toast. You’re heating up frozen pizza, but all I can smell is the crust burning. We’re still young— your sheets haven’t been washed since you moved in two months ago. Your pillow is yellow, suspiciously so, but you’ve bought a new one… Read more →
COYOTE COMES with the crack of a branch. With the brush of breeze through lace. With the mothwing flutter of light on your cheek. With the passing of sand through your hands. Coyote comes in the shape of a question: Trespasser? Or trespassed upon? Look behind, he asks. At crossings you made. Scars you left on the land. Barbed wire… Read more →
My father long-gone, I open one of his books, Bonnard or Vuillard—torn paper flutters to the floor. His drawing of two cows, one little & one big, their outlines wobbly as calf legs. A door opens to that day when he told me stories about a year he spent roping cattle, being a cowboy. We rode through the valley. Cigarette… Read more →
A grandfather would, I’m told, stand before the mound made by those big red ants. Black loafers, white socks, pleated slacks his nice pants, a cotton white short sleeve t, slicked black hair, a pack of cigarettes in his right pocket, a book of matches left. Having siphoned gasoline from the Plymouth through a cut length of garden hose cut… Read more →
10 I’m dreading her leaving before the plane even lands. I take pictures and label them last dinner, last gelato, last hug, like my daughter is dying instead of home from college for a short visit. There are awkward hellos from her two brothers. She kisses the dogs. I remember how much she misses them when she’s in the hospital…. Read more →
I don’t think I really understood the cash value of my PhD until my mom’s cat died a month before my dissertation defense. The diagnosis — terminal — had come just two weeks prior, delivered under the piss-yellow lights of the West Des Moines vet’s office. The odd, aggressive behavior, sudden penchant for eating cardboard, inexplicable but seemingly pointed campaign… Read more →
My mother texts me a link to a local news story: “8-year-old boy dies after eating strawberries from school fundraiser.” I sit on the toilet, bleeding, as I read this headline. I am 6 weeks postpartum, and my period has already returned. Not just some spotting – a full, heavy period. My body, ready to go. My almost-8-year-old boy just… Read more →
All humans have the right to magic, brujas y brujos. The spells important in the late night fadings of consciousness, trying to go to sleep by taking the position of a sleeping body. The theme of the class is Trouble. I’ve been in it, I’ve tried to get into it. The waitlist was too long. In the night, in a… Read more →
Part 1: Trying to Become White My mother emigrated from Mexico with her parents around the Mexican Revolution, and my father was born in Valentine, Texas in 1913 soon after his parents had also emigrated from Mexico. I was born in El Paso just across the Rio Grande, learning later I was a Chicano or first-generation Mexican American. The white… Read more →