Making tiny work of what I could not budge, the bear lifted my left-out cooler—so heavy it would have taken two people to stagger it to safety— and slammed it down, snapping its hinges. I lay in my flimsy shelter as he tore into what he wanted, smacked his lips, snuffled loudly for […]
In the beginning, every last one of them overshadows like a god. Their flesh, with its insistent power of resurrection, rends easily your inadequate membrane, silly shroud that surrenders as destiny is foisted upon you. A woman’s door is always ajar. A child makes itself at home, swelling you, as death does the […]
I thought of you this morning, our six years of letters, and the time you kissed me in the Saturday schoolyard. How we swung from side to side. Together, away. It was October then, like it is every year, like it is now, and that kiss tastes like green apples and leaves flaming in the […]
I’m one of those men, he told me with a crooked little smile, reaching gingerly across the space between us. Men you read about in history books, he said, as his right hand, the hand with one finger gone AWOL, vanished into the darkness up my skirt and crept beyond my underwear’s flimsy barrier. It […]
This one likes me best when I sit astride him, legs bent so knees push either side of his hips. I keep my eyes closed mostly but don’t mind that he watches my body, the grace of each easy collision. I like to think of twinkling lights, snow with no steps on it. I like […]
Five years into your child’s illness, when you can no longer conceive of life without its dank presence, you see a blanched sky bearing a trace of rose and the moon, risen huge— an affront like your lover’s face turned toward you for the last time, his sweet, rescinded body a scaffold you once clung […]
This is what became of the homely high school boy with the fine hands and big brain: he ended up sliding his fingers all day into the vaginas of other men’s wives. Expensive women who book six months ahead to take off their clothes for him. He keeps them waiting under a harsh light and […]