I tell my student surgeons are more likely to be sociopaths, full of themselves enough to make a wound, then declare it healed. A sociopath’s paper bag personality is a layer that separates shadow from exterior like a creepy … Read More
for going upside my head with the seared black on both sides sound of your voice that night I got high off you with a mythological kind of white girl whose own R&B vocals conjured childhood images of leather … Read More
Together we translate our mornings into coffee and the crossword, each with her own cup, each her own copy, the ritual habitual, afternoons into separate rooms, you pondering interstellar space while I’m deep into the intergalactic. ++++++++++++++++It’s true, we … Read More
From the patio of the architect’s favorite bar, you watch the city spiral out—a black net of chain-link fence, three crew cut soccer fields, the gray vein of West Gaines Street. This is not fun, but you cannot help … Read More
My friend pronounced, like a man without a past, that the images were real. It was only on certain days, when the light hit the kitchen counter—the flowers, the mask sometimes, more often the profile of the boy—that he … Read More
Even in the memories of the longest-lived whales, the ocean has never been quieter; this virus cuts a silent wake. Deep in their earwax, the dank white of baleen, whales fester the adrenal stink of our harpoons, our shipping … Read More
When did you last hug your mother? A. Before she spoke and I yelled. The word spun from my mouth +++like a screwball. B. When the stitches of the word bitch came loose in her glove. C. After the … Read More
the boy reminds me that he is not, in fact, my son. Too late now. We’re way into a country road & I’m carrying him against my chest like a rifle, the boy’s little calves dangling from my left … Read More
In an effort to legitimize a land ethic the lettuce farmers self-impose a subsidy on solitude. In certain circles, folks abide by the fundamental truth: nothing is good in the world unless the grocery bagger says it is. For … Read More
There’s so much they could have done for each other and a lot they could have generally just done. It was summer so evening came differently to the kids on the wet roofs dreaming of cosmonauts. Down the road, … Read More
despite my lamentation, I was wrong from the beginning about that book’s name. how did I misremember details from my life so thoroughly as to reinvent the self- important sounding matter whence I grew convinced I had been made? … Read More
++++++++++++++++++++++++was a book that stood thin on a low wood shelf at my father’s house throughout my childhood. I mistook it for truth: stars were animals that died, but didn’t, then lived forever in the night. heavens above. which … Read More