something leans in the night and bends it something reaches into the space but doesn’t quite speak the sleeping bees in their drowsy the sleeping trees if they sleep, and down the road my neighbor dreams a new forest one two three four, now we tumble out the door the sky crackles and the dry ground thumps like a drum… Read more →
It was little and it was fast and it was nothing. In the heavy dark my neck was a fencepost stringing barbed apologies between my body and everyone else’s. Obscure lessons, whispered the man in the hurricane. How bitter the winds were, how they peeled me from my skin. How I wanted to be fast and small and nothing at… Read more →
A producer asks you to pose naked lying on a block of ice. A pantry moth flies into the trap of glue and pheromones. It’s you and a veteran and there’s sexual tension because you’re a girl and he’s a guy. Do you have the right sound equipment to flirt? When you go to sleep, pantry moths lay eggs on… Read more →
In humans, chimerism is a rare genetic disorder where the blood contains two genetically distinct blood types, featuring more than one set of DNA. You lived alone, first by choice, then out of habit, perched in the drafty window sill with the pothos and the schefflera, studying the starlings, so separate from the shatter and gasp. And then you were twinned, born one May, quietly mewling, wet fingers reaching. The routine operation, after which the doctors introduced you to yourself. Chimerism, they said, shadow wombed. You are: a sister self. You are: born wet and two. You are unmade. All you heard was the gentle rush of the word twin. A breath slipped through your lips you didn’t know you were holding. You met yourself the pushy nose of a twinflower edging above the surface of the dirt. The linneae borealis nodded in the woods, two pink heads blushing and conspiring.
I. Lodging A neighborhood of vinyl-clad double-wides; a crop-dusting prop plane sweeps corn and soy. A woman walks by and asks if I own the home. She’s from farm country too—a lush rolling plain of corn fields that smell sweet in late summer. Rootless transplants from Philadelphia, Wilmington, Jersey, and Dover have settled this driftwood spit. We both come from… Read more →
The toilets in the Foyer du Bon Conseil did not have seats. After nearly twenty-four hours by plane, multiple trains, and one little automobile, I had arrived at my new home, a French foyer de jeune travailleur. Through the iron gate, I could see the four-story building, white stone draped in ivy. The entrance was surrounded by pink and white… Read more →
Who’s Homer? That’s what the cab driver asks me after I settle into the back seat. What? We’re in Las Vegas, and his question doesn’t make any sense. Homer, he says again. The Greek poet? I suppose so, the cab driver confirms. It’s a question I sometimes ask people. I got it from a fare who told me she asks… Read more →
Henry Grew Crosby, 32 years old, of a socially prominent Boston family, and Mrs. Josephine Rotch Bigelow, 22 years old,… were found dead last night, each with a bullet in the head…The couple died in what is described as a suicide compact…His wife was formerly Mrs. Mary Peabody. The New York Times, December 11, 1929 c.1917 Mrs. Mary (Polly)Peabody: In… Read more →
—for Katie Mead My friend, we die mid- sentence. En medias res. We die half-delirious in labor reversed. You expected poignant last words but instead came a heap of trash from your mother’s mouth: bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, she said, a bullshit to halos, a bullshit to wings, a bullshit to golden god mansions, celestial beasts sharp-fingering bullshit harp strings. Because… Read more →