publications

She imagines you dead in the bathtub. The split second you slide under. The gasp. The sputter. She catches you, placing her hands around your tiny waist, your body like a slippery fish. She lifts you up and presses you to her chest. She imagines you dead as she walks...

Tonight, I make my return to the water. The weather is warm, the moon full, the time right again to take stock of all I’ve removed and dropped into the deep black lake behind my home. I wrote and sunk the first message a decade ago, now. Recorded my confession on...

Sixty minutes before she steps in front of a speeding van, she blenders bird seeds with berries for her vegan twelve-year old, who dirties their kitchen each Saturday for some type of raw bake-off, but cannot get up early enough on schooldays to mix her own shake. As...

That fall we spent our Saturdays deep in Amish country. We didn’t live there, but Becca’s boyfriend did, forty minutes from our McBurb near Reading. The farmhouse supposedly belonged to the boyfriend’s uncle, but I never saw an adult in all the times we were there –...

My uncle had a spotted pig, called Stripe. Which tells you a lot about my uncle. It started small but it got big, as pigs do. It was still small when my aunt left, sick of the smell of pig shit and the endless speculations on the weather. She packed her suitcases into...

There are places where everyone wants to buy a house, but that’s not here. We have empty subdivisions. We have coyote in broad daylight. Our hospital is flying at half-mast. This used to be a steel town. Slag pits line the highway. The sun sets behind mountains of...

If word gets around, I’ll say you made it all up. I’ll tell them you’re lying, that you’re just looking for attention. But, if you promise to take it to your grave, then I’ll tell you this: The professor He tells the class to put the subject first. Who is doing the...