Photo by Kevin Seibel on Unsplash The summer I was pregnant, I watched with growing detachment as my breasts asserted themselves and my spreading hips echoed my mother’s. I had the urge to nest—procuring diapers and wet wipes, obsessively dusting, developing a sudden, unexpected interest in scrapbooking—and became, for a short while, someone I […]
Photo by Jon Sailer on Unsplash Something there, smaller and meaner than before— where the palm of the hand rests on the collarbone— ails me. I’m sure that’s where the shame is. How it shrank like an old walnut, what was once the locust-heart of summer. The meadowlark’s V for victory over the yellow […]
Photo by Umanoide on Unsplash The orchestra ambushes me with Mahler’s Fifth. I never played; I have no innate sense of music, so it’s a shock to feel the brass ransack my body. Stop I rasp when the trumpets make my edges blur and a solo horn tugs my soul through my throat. Stop. […]
Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash I must remember to open the cabinet of forgotten things. That’s where the bottles are. Bottles of solutions that enhance memory. Or do they stoke the imagination? I think I recall the lock’s combination. Isn’t it the date of a French king’s death? Or the net worth of […]
Photo by Andrew Eihausen on Unsplash After Edgar Kunz’s “Piano”¹ My father is the kind of dying that acts as reminder. When I call I can hear, through clearness, breath. All the signs of the living he does are dying signs. He is a messenger. I wish I could drag his body sled-bound, […]
Photo by Josh Hild on Unsplash The heat in the living room worked only sometimes, and there was a tangled hairball of exposed wiring in the upstairs bedroom, and the tumbledown stairs that descended from the front porch were crumbling—all this was how Kim could afford to live in the house on Front Street. […]
Photo by Kovid Rathee on Unsplash I. School, and she can’t breathe, and she forgot her inhaler again. She keeps forgetting, can’t keep things straight. Forgot her lunch last week, twice. The inhaler should stay with the nurse, but she needs it so often that she now keeps it in her desk, takes puffs once […]
Photo by Louise Pilgaard on Unsplash Understand I can no longer consider the alternatives. I’ve run in every direction at once and found myself out of breath, but not out of harm’s way. I know harm’s way, all her horses’ names. Pills and Noose and Knife and Love, always Love the last to leave […]
Photo by Ruslan Valeev on Unsplash I told the mortician to mix our ashes I wish to see you as a speck of sand maybe a fistful of waves gnashing until white stone all the lilies bursting from this rapture your opal lips shiver like two harp strings I pluck a symphony from the […]
Photo by Pascal Debrunner on Unsplash The road is white, the color of no road anywhere. The white road becomes whiter and narrower as it recedes into a sunless, ochre-tinged sky. Everything is tinged with ochre, except one house, which is all white. The white house looks as if it’s been drawn by a […]