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publications

Reckoner

Reckoner

Overnight, the lake reveals itself. We wake to the sudden beating of its body against our properties. The sudden beating. The sudden beating. At first, we ignore it. We see it but pretend not to. Like we often do with our neighbors. But then our pets begin to...

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Triple Body Walking

Triple Body Walking

We had always been many-in-one, even before witch-woman Nnenka's curse made it flesh. Our mothers stood at different cooking fires, our fathers prayed to different ancestors, yet destiny pulled us together like scattered beads finding their way back to a single...

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Owl Fantasma

Owl Fantasma

Between Abuela's mobile home and mine, a white sand path interweaves the moonlit scrub pine. Sometimes it is ribboned with the tracks of sidewinders, so we watch our step, especially near the Spanish bayonets beneath which they like to coil. If the snakes have any...

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Zen Lyrics for the Carhartt Guru

Zen Lyrics for the Carhartt Guru

My dad sits on the couch after Thanksgiving dinner and announces he wants buried in Carhartt overalls. He's 82, retired from the mines, and too cheap to buy Carhartt while he's alive. "I hear they’re warm. Leave a clawhammer in the pocket." He pats his jeans. "If...

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Before The Everything After

Before The Everything After

The television casts a garish parade of colors across your unlined brow. From the corner of the bar, you watch me, not the game, but drop your eyes when I meet your gaze. More mating whisper than mating call. Wesley, the sleepy-eyed bartender, spies my nearly-finished...

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Out of Season

Out of Season

Your older sister is the amusement park at the end of the boardwalk, the one that’s been in the mayor’s family for a century and looks it; the one the mayor doesn’t maintain because the newer one, halfway down and closer to the big hotels, gets all the foot traffic...

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Companion Wanted

Companion Wanted

Seeking a companion. Need not be romantic; platonic is fine. Just someone to wake up to for that morning breath that feels stale with closed-mouth soft snores, and those eyes holding long, floating eyelashes that I want to touch but won’t. Just someone who will empty...

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Train Home

Train Home

Winter lay down fat in its white robe as if to die. The war was over, and he ached to get home after years of service in foreign parts. The villagers kept cramming his mouth with sausages and boiled cabbage and the grime of their fingers. They had made him their own....

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Cappuccino

Cappuccino

Capuchin monkeys are named after the monks who are named after the drink or something like that, could be the other way around, so when Sam says that Olivia’s voice is like cappuccino we nod but we don’t really know what it means because none of us have tasted...

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