after Meredith Martinez My husband left me in February. He left with my love in his hands, and I walked to the pharmacy for a carton of eggs. The eggs were carried home in my dirty tote bag like a promise kept. I did not swing them, jerk them, or threaten to jostle...
The moonlight-sequinned sea says There’s something I want to tell you. I walk on, pretending not to hear, fling a pebble at her face, then another, as far as they’ll go. The sea says, Listen to me, please. I want to tell her, Shut your waves up, shut your waves up and...
My lover says that they’ll give me 380 words before saying goodbye forever, and it’s380 words because she’s going to be dragged back North across the border and I’ll have to beseparated to the South; she checks her watch and tells me that I have 333 words left, so I...
After cake and ice cream, the guests, in their painted smiles and polka dot attire, settle in to watch the man they’ve hired to entertain them. An actuary analyst! So much better, already, than last year’s accountant or the year-before-that’s linguistics scholar. ...
Crypt 1: Broomstick Skirts In robes of shell pink sunset over woodland hills, girls float the river to dance on hollow logs. Their gossamer gowns, devoured by fungus, release spores in the wind. In broomstick skirts, my sisters float skyward with petals on water. Soft...
The vibration of the harvest gold phone that hung from our kitchen wall the last Sunday you called. Mom’s fingernails digging into my palm as she yanked the receiver and slammed it in the cradle. The deep divots imprinted on the back of my thighs from the plastic seat...
Thinking about how she flung a softball right into my dad’s eye. How with her he was like helluva pitch, girl. How he said she could split the light with her fastball. How he said man, it's too bad you can’t play real baseball with an arm like that, too bad softball...
A plane ploughs through the clouds as she scrubs and cleans the plugholes in the washbasins and the kitchen sink and the laundry and another plane ploughs when she mops the floors and washes the benches and polishes the windows and another plane ploughs when she...
At some point, we’ll forget the rabbit’s name, how it came to die, the rush we were in to bury it, and when people ask, we’ll shrug, and Vince will snarl his upper lip in the way his body’s patterned to do since we went into care. But right now, we tip marbles and red...
There’s a beautiful beach. You get there by walking through a shady path, and then you’re on the soft sand. Some low hills far off, green and silver in the sun. There’s a couple on the beach. The woman on a towel with a hat to shade her eyes. The man in the water up...
I once fucked a guy in a redwood water tank. The kind that once held water caught from rain, maybe filled by the county every couple of months. The kind that now looks like a dorm room, a single bed pushed against rounded walls, a small fridge next to a tiny table and...
My face turns into my aunt’s face as I age. Now we know what she would have looked like at 35, 37, 40, 42. Lost in a gaze. Cigarette in hand, land of left-handed thoughts in her brain. Keep speaking while I rest a while in here, leaning back into the carseat of my...