did you hear about the shooting? my cousin jasmine texts. i tell her no, open up twitter to see if something’s trending. nada. she responds: they shot a girl in her home. she was my friend’s niece. the details: a ten-year-old, a drive-by, some gang shooting up the...
In our neighborhood, the dumpsters peel orange but not like citrus. White liquid seeps from their underbelly. Nothing drinks the dumpster milk. Tomcats fight in the periphery while a family celebrates in gunshots. No one thinks of what happens when the bullets...
I’m not interested, she said, in restless craving, space-time music, outside combining elements. Images only, she said, with a shake of white hair. Minutes later—on time, she said—life, non-human, began to unravel. The Russian beside her—brave, grassy, invasive—was...
The ghosts have come looking for my maid, but the maid is not here. The maid is out back in the alley with crusts of bread and apricot pits and chicken bones. The maid looked hard at me when I put her outside. Her eyes black and round as new moons. My whole body...
Blonde girls at school seek to become blonder. Blonde girls arrive with new highlights, preening at the way their faces are framed by golden honey. Blonde girls say, “I put sun in,” and blonde girls ooh and ahh. Blonde girls coo and comfort when the results are less...
You’re good at selling words. Every morning you go to the market with the other girls and offer up a word or two to the man on the stall. By the time you leave you have a pocket full of money, enough to buy food to last a week for you and momma. Momma doesn’t like you...
“A Guide to Small Town Ghosts” is actually four linked micro-stories, each of which devises and fulfills its own narrative shape while overlapping with the others to create a macro-shape. Think of that carnival game that requires you to drop four metal disks so that...
Like a Grimms’ fairy tale transported to Japan, “A Too Small Room” proceeds through a world whose houses, forests, and marketplaces are elementary, even quintessential, but make up only half its substance, since the space in which it exists is built every bit as much...
The baker’s skin, burnished from the heat of very hot ovens, is soft but taut. The taxidermist likes to pretend when she’s fondling the baker that she’s fondling an hourglass. The hourglass. What determines the duration of all activities, provides a semblance of order...
Five of us dodge the storm in Tammy DeLuca’s bedroom, even Kevin, who stays dressed. One at a time, we lie back, spread-legged and flustered, approximating grit. Here, Tammy directs a ray of light between Maggie’s legs, is the birth canal. We see only skin and the...
over the parking lot of Aldi’s. They bustle to snag unattended shopping carts, return them to the carousel, accept the quarter deposit from the locking mechanism. They position themselves like athletes or secret service agents, waiting for an old blue-hair to leave...
I had been snow-drifting through December, on slow trains and delayed buses, ending each day with a long icy walk past other bodies, also losing grip. I could not get home that night, none of us could; Spaghetti Junction had filled with snow. We decided to camp at the...