micro

My son starts grinding his teeth in the Fall of 3rd grade. As he sleeps. The scraping, the pressure - I hear it through the thin walls of our shoebox in the Tenderloin. Our third apartment this year. He in the bedroom, me on the couch. It keeps me up all night. Just...

At eight I was rich and powerful, controlled railroads and electric companies. A banker, I embezzled rainbows of cash that I flashed at the twins while our parents slept in. Let’s play restaurant, I’d say. Jacob, you’re the chef. I’ll be the customer who leaves a big...

The bloom of your skin as the river thickens around us. Constellations of algae exhale. We eat the fish that bob to the surface. Suffocated. The flesh tastes of mud and cumin. Our campfire flares in the night, a signal no one is close enough to answer. Three elements...

On Sewing and the Anatomy of Lips Cupid's bow: The contour line of the upper vermilion. I am drawn tight, nocked with pretty words and flattering susurrations, pulled close like the fletch of a hapless arrow trembling in that heartbeat of before—then released, flung...

Mom was pushing 80 past a semi on the wrong side of Madison, and it was one of them numbers with the cows in it, and you could see the faces peering out through the slats. She must have caught them on the periphery, or maybe she got a glimpse of me in the mirror, and...

Like a toddler lost in a laundry basket full of dirty towels, the Argentine music dances. Cuts through the candlelit fog by the lake. Hip-checks the couple swinging in the hammockfrom making out—still in their bathing suits from earlier that afternoon.They fall. The...

1. She collects seashells, three in a row. One domed, a Buddhist stupa; another hugs the ground, an earthworm after spring rain, seeking damp earth to nuzzle. The third is halved, amputated, an orange tongue searching a mate. A shell on land is life made nomad,...

Notice how they stand in the background of an old family photograph. How they all wear white. How they cloak their bodies in the pallor, fade like a troupe of ghosts. Remember how they started disappearing. How your tío went first, drank himself to death. How he was...

His boots lay down a path through the Timothy and Queen Anne’s lace. This tall, tall boy, with his long boy-legs, muscular basketball player’s legs, strides through the meadow as warblers alight on stalks of ironweed, then lift again and call out. The dog sniffs the...