For thirty-one of their thirty-two years together, Lydia and Meredith shared an evolving dumb joke which started one day in 1992 when Lydia came home from a rehearsal with a rash on her neck and claimed that she had Tennis Elbow. They would deliver increasingly...
When the war comes, I do not hear it. There are no planes overhead; It is civil, I am later told. I run through dry grass with other yard children, past creaking play structures, storm-gray walls, and an empty gas silo rusting in the arid field. I fall, clutching my...
If she'd been a regular girl like Janey, painting her nails whisper pink and talking with an affectation on the phone. Or an awkward girl like Amy, tending to elderly parents, holding down a job at the IGA while keeping straight A's. Or a weirdo like Naomi, even,...
You can probably imagine a husband-not-baby say he’s hungry, and the woman-his-wife Sienna hurry and scurry, her hands and fingers and wrists getting busy with kneads and whisks, mammaries leaking, while the baby-from-him sleeps, because Sienna must be efficient...
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...