Come, come. Sit beside me on this rock; it’s much more comfortable than it looks. Listen to me: all I want is to listen to you. Tell me everything: how you worry about losing your job, how your boss doesn’t appreciate your good ideas, how you worry about...
Your phone screen shatters on impact. This is the first thing you think about. Not your collarbone, which has snapped clean; not the airbag’s chemical smell still burning inside your nose. The phone. You think: all those pictures. The paramedic has your wrist. She...
I should like to collapse, right here on the bathroom floor, so thoroughly and completely that I bang my head, just enough for a noise, not a bleeding, not a concussion, but a thud declaring to the world: something is happening. Or at least, to my loved ones, who will...
Peter did not come home for the summer. We were dealing with it, his father and I. We knew how he felt about her, and we were happy. But the farm was too quiet. The kitchen was too clean and the handrails too polished, and most nights we could only talk of him and go...
I find one of your old contact lenses in the bath mat. Feel it under my big toe. A tiny ship. A coracle. Netted by some pubes and fibers. Has it really been that long since I shook out the mat? You hated its shag. Said it felt like stepping out of the bathtub onto...
Madhavi and I always race through the stone alley behind our houses to the makbara. The alley is rough; once I tripped and split my chin open. Five stitches. Since then, I don’t run fast. Madhavi wins the races, but I climb the monument quicker. We call it a monument,...
Mama sends me to the deli down the corner to buy yeast because she’s making pogácsa, even though I don’t even like pogácsa because it’s too salty and too dry and looks too much like a toad, but Mama bakes it anyway because, as she says, “Mothers Bake Pogácsas”,...
I can see you clearly now you’re leaving — a child of the garden again, and yes, everything is better outside, and as you say, it always was this way; it always was. I drink tea while you paint the long legs of the table, turning them red to green. You will not rush...
Edward Hopper, Eleven A.M., 1926. Oil on canvas, 28 x 36 inches. I’m in the ochre of it, the end of morning. The light is thick, impasto, nearly edible. Across the courtyard I hear a woman singing to someone. What is the song? I keep looking at my body—how is it...
When you approach the bridge, you will hear her moans. The teenagers go to Dead Woman’s Crossing, in search of love and destruction. It’s darker there, on this church hayride night. Flatbed truck with wooden benches and a scattering of hay. Driver crawls to the spot...
A box sits broken down across my lap. I slide out of the car into the garage and slip the box behind the tool bench—it’s there with nine other empty boxes. Dozens more pile up around me. My husband says it’s time to get rid of my collection. They’re not hurting...
We flush my sister’s goldfish down the toilet at three in the morning. She says the poor creature suffered a lot due to a condition inherent in all fish past twenty. I hold the flashlight, its beam stuttering over scales. The fish’s eyes look small, like black seeds....