micro

What you remember is how you had trouble believing it was Ohio, even southern Ohio, the way the river moved and swirled, rushing over rocks, and scuttling the overhanging brush clutching the bank, and the water legibly clear to the bottom in the shallower runs, grassy...

You ask me: What is the collective noun for a handful of spent cigars beneath the knotty, crooked oak in the parking lot outside the Dollar Store where you work, dark nubs nestled like easter eggs in the dewy grass, loops of paper bands snug around the ends, the...

The night your father and uncle guzzle a thirty-pack of Miller Lite and ride your glittery bike shirtless through the neighborhood, you punch through your screen and tumble into the mulch. You have no plan, no destination, just a vague ache that launches you out the...

We took BART and then a bus down University Avenue, me in my jeans and black pleather jacket, as soft as the surface of my tongue, which means not soft at all, and you in your leather skirt, zipper down the side seam. Every man’s eyes snagged on your torn fishnet...

but she is always multiplying, like a rabbit. In this version of the universe, Sally is only nine years old but she is always afraid, afraid of food poisoning, of losing her sense of smell, of screwdrivers that twist in the night. Evenings, she sits on her couch and...

The air raid sirens sounded and my brother Bruno scrambled, demanding to know where my basement was. I didn’t have a basement and informed Bruno it was the monthly test, that there was no attack, but Bruno started stacking canned goods, rifling through cupboards. I...

The swaddled newborn startles awake at a quarter to midnight. I plug his mouth with a powder blue pacifier bearing an elephant with a right ear so large it emerges stone soft, shaded blue, white sharply outlined. The eye drawn in a horseshoe shape makes it somehow...

This little boy has forgotten how he was made. He is old enough to know he can’t ask his teddy bear, but he is still young enough to love that bear and believe that it can feel the same pain and joy that the boy does. This boy knows he can’t ask his mother because she...

The secret to sin is to do it in secret. We learned secrecy young—two girls taught to swallow our hunger—so we meet up at nightfall once the last lights have gone out. We walk down the roads, cursing this town full of coal-miners and farmers and churches, cursing the...