It was the year the bank called and we suddenly noticed the cracks in the plaster, the fissure between the bricks, the silence behind the meadowlarks, the useless rustling of leaves. It was the year the bank called and we suddenly noticed the cracks in the plaster, the fissure between the bricks, the silence behind the meadowlarks, the useless rustling… Read more →
After months of not being able to be in the same room together, due to mutual fury and recrimination, my sister-in-law and I met for a walk on the beach. Separate cars. She was on time, I arrived late, a reversal of our usual pattern that possibly boded well. How to start? Should we look for shells? The sand dollars… Read more →
I didn’t want to fight her. But here we stood, facing off in the bluffs behind our houses, the dirt pocked with tracks where after dark older teens spun brodies and rolled their cars trying to climb the sheer canyon wall. Back here, behind neat rows of split-level homes and manicured lawns, where the gentle slopes of the streets gave… Read more →
Armchairs don’t leak honey any longer, but water. There’s so much water. So much. Soil from flooding. Soiled from flooding. Monsoons create aeolian lakes all over the backyard, newborn landscapes the sparrows and squirrels jointly luxuriate in. Ice arcs into rainbows, an untrod path to skate down while inhaling crisp, clean midnight. Far, but closer than you think, piles of… Read more →
I get on a ladder and pick the crabapples from my tree, put them in my bucket. There are way more than I’ll know what to do with, but I figure I’ll find recipes, maybe do some canning. I’m not really into jam, but I imagine being creative, filling pretty jars with fancy covers and giving them as gifts for… Read more →
my lover flirts with the world— anoints its muddy feet with honey and wipes them clean with a tuft of her hair. she does not get lost in the miracle of sanctity. she philanders under low bridges in sparse cities shooting up coquetry. and it knows her— blackbird harpist, she leaves her lyric in its breadth. she could warble anything… Read more →
There’s no way you haven’t noticedthat the western window—highand horizontal on the white wallof your bedroom, where we can look outon the place where we wet our bodies lit upwith shifting lights like rainbows—is wide open and all who are aware—and by that, I mean absolutely nobody—are witnessing the whispersand whines from the lovely whateverit is that we are doing…. Read more →
Three years before Dover,there was you, our class,the Texas Education Agency,a formal investigation,a suspension that went public. A week after that,everybody in our schoolhad heard of Scopes,Bishop Ussher,Inherit the Wind,Of Pandas and People. Two weeks before that,you shared with uspictures of your tripto the Galápagos, showedus fossils of trilobitesfrom your personal collection. Seven years after that,the TBE voted to droplanguage… Read more →
