Landlord
I do the work the way You- Tube taught me. Mid-drill, mid-plunge, mid-whack, I re-thumb my password, rewatch my confidence clip, leave nothing to the pros. I am saving myself thousands. I curate a fabulous collection of caulk in the basement. In the attic, four or five mattresses you don’t need to question. I say beautiful for modern and state-… Read more →
Subatomic
In the quarkiest parts of my body baseball is played / never played. I itch all summer to place / never place a hot dog against my tongue, for fireworks to vibrate and explode / never explode and kill / feed the silence of the infinite space above home plate. I smell like stadiums closing. In all my locker rooms,… Read more →
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 →
Ranger
Forever, I asked to not be me, but a place instead. Old cedars, devil’s club– little creek, kneel, drink. No years in the berries, just dusk’s breath of gnats, my Thank You like catkins, deer’s wheeze– here, gone, home again. When one trail ended in fireweed, my saw set down in stems, I sat by the rill and said Here…. Read more →
Invisible Weaver
invisible weaver when asked what I do, invisible weaver. then quickly before “but I see you, don’t I?” I define the occupation. some people’s first image is a wooden loom in a slant-ceiling attic, shuttle skidding warp-weft, shafts synching up down, no human in sight, so a ghost, a spirit, they think I’m jiving. others see a humming fluorescent-bright factory,… Read more →
Tunnel Woman
With a pack of camping gear, John rode buses north to find tunnels and talked to the people living inside them. Showing the trending TikTok video of “Tunnel Woman,” as well as old family photographs, John asked if anyone had seen his aunt. He was certain that Tunnel Woman was his aunt, but he only recognized her eyes in the… Read more →
Unincorporated
With a break in the rain we would gather behind our fathers and wheelbarrows to fill potholes. Undersides of leaves gazed up from the trapped rain– gravel raked in kicked ruddy clouds like woodsmoke, pillowing until we shoveled them full, the panes capped. Our gravel came from a two yard pile one of our fathers ordered from the quarry himself…. Read more →
The Multitudes
So many parts in one body; no wonder people get confused. The way my mother would bring up old boyfriends in an effort to keep me humble, that is, to keep me hers, the way my Maine Coon calico growls when anyone comes between us, then lunges, then sinks back against me, simultaneously tense and floppy, a wary baby; I’m… Read more →
Last Migration
The monarch’s wings pulse against my palm—its black veins like cracks in stained glass. Terminal, the doctor said yesterday. Six months, maybe less. Words that fell like stones into still water. Mother collected butterflies. Not with nets and pins, but with her Nikon. “Never capture beauty,” she’d say. “Just witness it.” I was seven when she photographed her last migration—thousands… Read more →