The desert doesn’t know we exist: Robert Smith singing through the speakers of a night-lit pool where the heat feels material with a sickness, and I insist I’m not angry with the man reading the Tao te Ching on the terry daybed beside me. The desert […]
After days of rain, wind howling swells of the Beaufort Sea onto the rocky shoreline with a spray of salt and spume, the rain turns to sleet and then sleet turns to snow. It should be spring already on the 141st meridian—where the border between the US and Canada gestures […]
Fresno, California. 1973. Not everyone gets a chance to watch their parents fall in love. I was six when it happened. My mother tended bar at the Airport Marina Lounge, where she first met Marshall. She’d wake me late at night and I’d yawn and shuffle after her in my […]
Together we are no one says the woman. Together we are anonymous. Can you, she says, hear the house waiting in the night? Can you hear the language there? It, like us, grows older. These days the man understands; once a bystander in a stranger’s dream photography, now […]
Such were skirts in college. Or, at least, Picasso paintings. So I got a job. The cubes were piled inside the cubicle, and cubicles composed the office space. The structure had its hundred offices. The orifices in their turns were sundry and assorted, many tiny. My own […]
She says, “If I leave before you, darling Don’t you waste me in the ground.” —Iron & Wine If I were to walk outside and turn west onto Silver Star Road, the day’s traffic passing by in a blur of metal as my arms hang useless at my sides […]
I loved the lie I loved lying next to the winter I lived beside the lie lying thin & white. I loved lying beside the tides. He let me drive the winding canyon to Malibu. I let him unwind. I loved being alive the winter […]
Everyone was worried and looking at everybody else in a new way. Some tabulated their hand-wringing in color-coded diagrams. Some unearthed glue guns, willed sea glass into zoetropes for barbies framed behind dreamhouse windows. Others divested: financially, emotionally. No one knew precisely what was happening at that very […]
A man took a hammer to Michelangelo’s Pieta, breaking Mary’s nose in three, fragmenting her fingers, leaving shards at tourists’ feet. Someone rescued her eyelid while someone else stole a tiny chip of her, then later sent it back. Outside San Leandro’s church, St Felicitas stood, stoic, […]
I moved here, to this place where the woods intersect the desert, to write. Because, for me, to write is excruciating: the endless encounter of a dread that is never overcome. The dread of my own undoing. But the ground here is soft; each step an impression in blood-red loam. […]