They came to town, one riding a lawnmower, the other carrying a leaf blower, their hair shorn tight and crisp like hedges. And their teeth: white, too white, so white they were blue. Flashed those teeth at everyone they passed as they wandered around our town. When...
The pigeon-pea, that lies under seventeen cardboard mattresses, grew in the stone age, amongst wild animals, and traveled across time and continents, and out of a store-bought box, as others poured into a clay pot to simmer as dahl on my fire, for me to feel it now....
She imagines you dead in the bathtub. The split second you slide under. The gasp. The sputter. She catches you, placing her hands around your tiny waist, your body like a slippery fish. She lifts you up and presses you to her chest. She imagines you dead as she walks...
Tonight, I make my return to the water. The weather is warm, the moon full, the time right again to take stock of all I’ve removed and dropped into the deep black lake behind my home. I wrote and sunk the first message a decade ago, now. Recorded my confession on...
Sixty minutes before she steps in front of a speeding van, she blenders bird seeds with berries for her vegan twelve-year old, who dirties their kitchen each Saturday for some type of raw bake-off, but cannot get up early enough on schooldays to mix her own shake. As...
That fall we spent our Saturdays deep in Amish country. We didn’t live there, but Becca’s boyfriend did, forty minutes from our McBurb near Reading. The farmhouse supposedly belonged to the boyfriend’s uncle, but I never saw an adult in all the times we were there –...
My uncle had a spotted pig, called Stripe. Which tells you a lot about my uncle. It started small but it got big, as pigs do. It was still small when my aunt left, sick of the smell of pig shit and the endless speculations on the weather. She packed her suitcases into...
Caterpillar Killer by Shastri AkellaDirty Shirley by Shannon BowringGiving Up by Catherine CadePicking Up Stones by Brad ClompusIn the Closet by Grace ElliottWays of Karst by Jamie EtheridgeSea Bugs by Amanda HadlockEndless Spoonful by Susie HaraCharlotte Sometimes by...
There are places where everyone wants to buy a house, but that’s not here. We have empty subdivisions. We have coyote in broad daylight. Our hospital is flying at half-mast. This used to be a steel town. Slag pits line the highway. The sun sets behind mountains of...
If word gets around, I’ll say you made it all up. I’ll tell them you’re lying, that you’re just looking for attention. But, if you promise to take it to your grave, then I’ll tell you this: The professor He tells the class to put the subject first. Who is doing the...
Faye says she doesn’t believe in coincidence, but the day she burns the last of the cows, two women hurl themselves from dizzying heights like deadweight dropped into the sea. In the autumnal air, clotted yellow with ash, Faye claims a sudden lightness—a tug of going...
I like my men close, their arms like shelter. Yours pull me into your sternum as we roll around a twin-size bed. The headboard creaks against curtain-darkened windows. Noon out, but in this sticky heat, warm air sandwiched between marijuana and days-old wasabi, we...