The other girls laugh when she struggles to stand up in the ditch, her mouth edged with dirt. She braces for another blow, but they let her scramble away, and she wonders if her shoulder blades poke strangely from her T-shirt, another mark against her. She runs home,...
The town scalper says he lost his eyes at the supermarket. Left them on a shelf in the toothpaste aisle, and when he came back, they were gone. I say maybe he wasn’t looking hard enough, and neither of us laugh. My sister keeps a jar of two brown eyes on a shelf in...
—finally, it is night and you wrench the bulb from the porch ceiling and all the moths plop to the floor and you traverse the rug of ripped wings and squashed thoraxes and the sounds of your boots pierce my chest but this time there is no blood and the pain I'm...
I laugh at your need to keep your knees covered, shorts too long, pants too short, colors muted and dark. At night, I unpeel you, uncovering hair grown along scars from childhood scrapes along coral, swirls in patterns of fronds, cerebellum, a reef of skin for me to...
When the birds go quiet, the girls stop walking. The air around them is glassy and pale, like a glass of milk their mother used to pour every morning: half milk, half water. When the birds go quiet, the girls can hear their own breathing: quick and light like cat paws...
It was the night Johnny came back to town, one of those pent-up summer nights when the sky trembled heavy with unshed moisture, weighing us down, the burden of it pressing us into the dust, and we wanted to scream let go! but heaven wouldn’t unleash that water, held...
You could think of it as an evolutionary advancement. Steelheads can spawn multiple times, whereas their salmon kin buck their way upstream only once. It’s a good thing: the average steelhead dad swims out to the big ocean for a couple of months, has a time of it,...
I have this dream: We’re back in the church of Santa Margherita de Cerchi. You’ve written a letter to Beatrice Portinari on a receipt for leather shoes—requesting our love last through this life and the next. Me, I don’t pray this way. I go down to the river, which...
Why not the boy from high school with the red hair and freckled skin? Classmates said he liked you, said he was too shy to ask you out, but you knew that wasn’t true. You knew because he was a Nice Boy, an Above You Boy who was friends with the Jock Boys and the Above...
Step 1: Butter both sides of two pieces of bread. Put mayonnaise on the outside of both. The crows outside caw his arrival from their nest up the light pole. I can tell they’re talking to me because I’ve learned that even crows sound different when they talk to...
-after the paintings, The Baby (1944) and Artist's Daughter by the Sea (1943) by Milton Avery Why I chose to enter the world at a time of such violence and destruction, I will never know. But births always come after deaths; adults seem to forget this. It is only we,...
Dear Ginny, It’s the last night of September. This week, your leaves started to change—darkest green to richest red. Your growth this first year has been miraculous, even for you, my hardy twining vine. I remember planting you in the midnight hours on March 13th...