Issue 12
Upstairs, the dog has dropped its ball. New life, it bounces twice. New life mimics the old, a thought which might bring comfort, might bring…
Say it’s true that they found her a mile from her house, hands and feet tied behind her. (The reporter writes she did that to…
Belief requires lack of proof: I think there will be stars because they’re gone. Now you. Now that you’ve gone to prove again what absence…
When I find you, darling, in the night curled on the rug in the living room, insomniacal as the TV— though the dog’s happy, the…
Atlanta, even your magnolias smell like credit cards— they are pretty, sure, they’re grand. Always the whine of power blowers like a…
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster… —W.H. Auden Waterlogged and barely floating in a cove of Lake…
Far from woodland or savanna, a rafter of wild turkeys, at least a dozen in my yard, their black bellies and iridescent wings glistening in…
You get high, I’ll have a drink. They’re just words, same as sediment, same as palpate. Let’s make something small to steward together, one little…
You will be leaving soon, drifting to where you cannot find me—our days a flock of blackbirds gone south for the winter. I miss already…
Like a winter day that arrives in June when there’s nothing to do but drink black coffee, watch the rain, so too will the thin…
We’re drinking coffee at the shop on Grove when my aunt’s DNA starts to rumble. Nerves shake to the surface, shear waves ripple her cheeks.…
It began when I was small, ended when I was much larger. You could hardly see me through a microscope, then only through a telescope.…
My hair is a bristly statue. My ears are gramophones; a small dog sits on my shoulder and cries into them. My nose is a…
Mid-summer Mary Lou’s getting hauled across the way, surrounded by the sweaty men of Weeks Marina. She sways gently in the lift. Elsewhere, perhaps the…
After the Super Derecho, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, 2012 On the third night of the power outage, we sat in the living room after…
Covert, hardly cordial, came commands from the quarters, hind and head. Twin branches of the same government. My mind: heretic, fiend for fashion, my rhetoric…
1. Because she thought even fish said something about class. Mud-blooded catfish, for example—fried up only by men who mow lawns and nail shingles and…
was the name she called us, and what she meant was clumsy, graceless, all assholes and elbows tripping up the steps, meaning: Well, I don’t…
Nothing sturdy. Windsock beside the pole barn just waiting for a breeze. Mud daubers whispering below the roof eaves. The whitewashed, weathered tongue-and-groove boards could…
Lately, I was afraid of not living close enough to the seeded circle of wildflowers, but now, out the window I see the verdant, purple…
A list expects you know this: what is separate—item A, item B, item C—and what implicitly is allowed passage, but the space surrounding a conjunction…
Your only line is, “Oh, God.” There are no small parts…. Try it. No, not like that. Where is Lee Strasberg when we need…
Names have been changed because even a former mistress needs to keep secrets. The first time Nick tried to kiss me, I resisted. He was…
My father’s used Town Car was riding on a spare tire, leaning hard to the left as we drove across a bridge into Mexico over…
DEATH Halloween is a celebration of death, of dead things and things that kill—vampires and werewolves and zombies—but also a time of literal death, first…
During a recent summer I took up the habit of taking my dog on hour-long strolls around my city, New Orleans. I was fighting the…
Northern Mariana Islands, 1970 My mother, seventeen, perfumes herself against malevolent spirits. Dabs the scent on her wrists and neck. Everyone in the house is…
A few weeks after Tom’s funeral, the lawyer, Mr. Singer, read aloud the part of Tom’s will that gave instructions on how to dispose of…
Legal Fireworks. Well, there were legal ones and illegal ones. That Christmas, there were legal dads (the divorced ones who might stick around) and illegal…
The barge arrives late in the rain. The wind drives the rain in gray sheets across the ferry, the river brown and roiling, the liftgate…
All these songs were written for Julia. Note the passive construction—it’s intentional. Sure, I put the pen to paper, cut shapeless feeling into word. But…
Lake Vostok is the largest sub-glacial lake on Earth. And yet, it isn’t frozen: the ice on top exerts such pressure that the buried water…