The neighborhood where I lived during my teenage years had a community swimming pool. It was small but clean: an aqua rectangle surrounded by pebbled cement, with a cobwebbed bathroom and a splintered picnic table, a rise of trees on one side of the wrought iron fence and a slope of grass on the other. […]
Addressing the morning I say
It was good of you to come
Dhruv found this faux French restaurant—a restaurant of sorts but perhaps more of a cafeteria—off the bypass road of a highway called Research Boulevard, close to his hotel. There were many of these restaurants all over the southern and midwestern states to which Dhruv traveled for work, and he had eaten in most of them. […]
1 The interior holds out its leathery hands. It wants to take me to California Where technicians will construct my head, And where the streetlights are broken yolks And small furry things crawl up my legs. 2 I decline the offer so the interior flips a switch Which makes my teeth cold as though I […]
I. Before the invention of glass, time was not translucent. Mostly it kept to itself, bandaging the wounded, sleeping inside the minerals that formed below our restlessness. Sometimes a volcano spit out a fugitive star—it cooled into obsidian, a window we could neither repair nor see through. But its arrows taught us the meaning of […]
Spell the name slowly before you come, as I have asked you to come, bearing me a sea-blue porcelain platter piled with what remains of what Maine was. As I said, the name can be that of anyone you wish never to see again, knowing if you did, your life, and happiness, were you to […]
Four years before I changed my name to Silas, when I was twenty, I briefly dated a girl who was deaf. When we were together, I still identified as a lesbian—a butch lesbian. I was a feminist, a women’s studies major, a frequent attendee at Ani DiFranco concerts. I was also firmly in denial about […]
[hear the author read this piece by clicking this link.] I was born on a hill two blocks back from the Pacific Ocean. I was born in a garage apartment that I never saw, and then my parents moved even farther from the shore. That was before my father went back to Vietnam, taken with […]
Oxeye daisy with its petal rays, unassuming eyebright’s honey spot. I found a wildflower called Alma Potschke. Lilium, lady’s thumb, rosy pussy toes. Violet patch by bean pot, apple tree. Wild rose on Henry Street. Scent, messages, allusive flower, special name. Great Aunt Violet’s beloved primroses, her exquisite virgin’s bower. Who better understood than any […]
Too much was stolen that day to change his mind. What grew on the goats stayed on the goats as he fell into himself. The revolution was flattered, talked into a microphone that resembled a human body. Misery assembled with a peculiar silence, diseased and searching through his childhood. But it was the years afterwards […]