The Liu family didn’t agree on much. Nothing at all really, except my dumplings looked like insects, and they did. No matter how I tried, it didn’t matter. They stayed insects. Small lips with off-sized heads, impoverished bellies, and frail vertebrae threatening to dissolve in liquid-thin containers, but this is where the agreement ended. Each member of my wife’s family… Read more →
At the Middle Country Road underpass, just beyond Smithtown, the swirling snow began to melt as soon as it hit the ground. As the temperature fell, dark patches of ice formed near the edges of the parkway. Moving cars kept the road from freezing, but, as the traffic thinned, fingers of black ice crept toward the center. * * *… Read more →
The boy in the labyrinth is tired of looking. There is a boy in the sky. The boy above coaxes his big shadow into a widening circle, encompassing the boy in the labyrinth. Between the two, an image–shadow over the face of one, shadow covering the body of the other. Sunlight behind the head of the boy in the sky,… Read more →
I was the child born hybrid from the fissure that sent black rock and white ash. Rendered from magnets, minerals, and medicinal plants. If you bit me hard enough to break skin, I would poison you. The other children poked me with willow branches, but they could not deliver the hot copper from my veins. I slept under the snow,… Read more →
The boy in the labyrinth knows the possibilities of darkness: either the beast or not the beast. Either motion or stillness. Flowers push their heads through eye sockets. A little breath hushes the velvet black. God’s eyes pierce the gloom. The boy thinks about the minotaur’s music and his own lost ball of string. Whether the nest at the heart… Read more →
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead. –William Stafford, “Traveling Through the Dark” He doesn’t mind filling chuckholes, painting lines, plowing snow, but hates mornings when he clocks in, sees “Road Kill” next to his name. The first starts with a raccoon, bloated and sweet on the yellow line of Route 162. We usually leave small… Read more →
is found in the back of journals that are only written by the victors. It’s not uncommon to find entries revised into myths or a soldier’s groan nestled within the burly spine. After reading the index, the most troubling reference was a story detailing a 7-year-old Iraqi girl, who knocked on the driver’s side window of a HUMVEE with her… Read more →