Toodle-loo, Kangaroo The last known living slender crawfish died in a small pool (technically, a kitty litter box, but perfectly effective as a small pool) in an off-campus university laboratory in Sydney, New South Wales. A thin antenna released from the body and...
I wake up to your moaning while releasing yourself in the bathroom without bothering to run the faucet or the shower, and a slick stream gushes out from deep inside me, not a normal period, but a deluge that started yesterday after a dry patch of three months, the...
Metaphors for a Tumor Like a spaceship was flying through a meteor shower in her boy’s skull. Knock knock, he’d say, and when she answered who’s there, he’d giggle and say nothing; the spaceship had blown it all to smithereens. Like a plane that’s flown too low and...
They would have told you not to go to that party. Bowls filled with candy and condoms. Tequila. Vodka. Rum. Bottles lining the counter. You and your friend, hiking across a closed golf course because the security guard wouldn’t let any of you into the condo’s parking...
“An enslaved African woman, unable to prevent her children’s sale into slavery, placed some rice seeds in their hair so they would be able to eat when the ship reached its destination...However, as they disembarked the slave ship, the planter who eventually bought...
After dinner, after you have wiped down her highchair, the tray, the peeling surface of the kitchen table, after you have gotten down on your hands and knees and scraped the crumbs into your bare hands and tossed them into the trash, you button your daughter into her...
The cobweb-fine curtains blow in the wind, a storm gathers, the men work in the fields, the cat spits out its milk, and I knead, knead, knead the dough on the board, eight loaves already made, another proving, but still I knead, knead, knead the dough, my hair, tied...
*inspired by the photo “Candy Cigarette” by Sally Mann* Icy blue stare and perpetual pout. Blonde hair like a mini-Brigette Bardot. She’d be trouble, that one. Just like her mother. I don’t think I ever saw that child smile the entire summer she’d come to stay with...
We are the flowers who remember ice. We grew beside the glacier as it drew away, groaning. Raw stone lay broken, moss grew thick, then we could use it. That terrain longed for us—soil shallow, stone strong, and our roots twining deep even as the glacier still moved...
From the back porch, they swore, young parents, they had nothing to fear. The moment they’d thought they’d been waiting for: summer stars, sleeping toddler, river slapping the seawall at the bottom of the yard. Case numbers statewide dropping for weeks, an e-mail from...
Yung-Su brings a live dove, a Eurasian Collared with dust-brown wings and a black nape, holding it in both of his hands like a carton of eggs. Beats the hell out of Ever's "With Deepest Sympathy" card and my bouquet of stargazer lilies, stained pale pink inside,...
So I forget the tanks rolling over the wheat fields towards my house, and now I am on my ninth loaf. I knead the dough. Before he left, I kneaded my husband’s shoulders to loosen the knots. I will carry on — kneading, shaping, baking. At the open window, his cat...