NATCHEZ I saw ankles turn as the rocker moved. I could smell the distance between cypress and cypress and swamp gum. I heard footsteps late on the floorboard. Low agonies across the hall for many years. For a while it was the little white wagon and difficult latch. New […]
It is an extraordinary coincidence that on the morning of the day of my incapacitating accident, my mother called to tell me that Moira had committed suicide. I had just returned from dropping my daughters off at school and was getting ready to mop up the apartment when the […]
The crows nest in a tree with a plaque, some place a football player in summer training got struck by lightning and died. It was the 60’s and all the young girls who loved him and all the mothers and fathers planted the tree where he fell. There’s nothing […]
It was like walking through the city park after finishing work for the day and noticing that the trees have white tags tied around their trunks, and, on closer inspection, that the tags contain numbers. * It was like thinking about the numbered trees living arboreal life outside numbers, […]
This is not a test. I am broadcasting to you from the garden. Witch bones are in my teeth. I am a third generation scattering. My brother is the successful one. My sisters might not know my name. I have my father’s features and some of my mother’s worst […]
From the top of her head as she trots up his office stairs, Chris judges Brandy Mueller to be in her late 20s. The part in her dull brown hair is straight as a plumb line, and her brown toenail polish matches the color of the strap on her […]
Back then, Sara invited the artists for rum-spiked punch. I brought a lover with his colossal German nose. I almost forgot how they adored him. How he built a cartilage between us— Instructing the guests in an essential trick of how to tip go-go boys. Now, a church strikes […]
There was a basketball mural in the cafeteria, the restaurant in town served grits with runny eggs, and Yvonne taught me how to drive her pick-up truck down rural Alabama dirt roads. She was a woman on whose lap I gladly sat, window down, her feet at the pedals. […]
It was like arriving too early to visit the Freud Museum and being forced to walk around the neighborhood on a cold November morning, trying to blow heat into your hands. * It was like arriving too early, walking several times around the block, and wondering what psychopathology such […]
That single tiny portrait remaining. A heap of inscrutable letters and a white dress. The envelopes already torn. What’s left has been stitched together, piece by piece. Now the needlework is all we can see. * Long years apart— can make no breach a second cannot fill… Recent months have […]