Mary Crockett Hill is the author of A Theory of Everything (Autumn House Press, 2009), selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the Autumn House Award, and If You Return Home with Food (Bluestem Press, 1999), winner of the Bluestem Poetry Award. She teaches at Roanoke College in southwestern Virginia.
It has something to do with invisible string rippling out across a universal sunset, wrapping us up like the perfect brown corded package. Something to do with the vibration of stars— how they flicker in tune with each other, humming cosmically. And though I’ve never seen this reported anywhere I also believe it […]
This is also the world. A small boy drops a maple leaf down a well. A girl, slightly larger, does likewise— peering over the stone lip to guess the leaf’s curled and wayward descent. Across the yard, behind a stardust bush, the housecat is toying with something still alive. It flits through the grass, […]
How they must have loved the flowers— generations of pink and lavender in his small side yard, the careless abundance of orange. I had seen it from the road and, with a grain of envy, wondered at the life that could nurture such a garden. Now I see the blossoms were not an offering to […]
He looked like sullied laundry, which is to say Jeff Clark, which is to say the scrubby field where Jeff Clark took me when I was 5 and he 13 to teach me, as he put it, how to hump. Jeff didn’t take my clothes off, or his for that matter, or stick any […]
I went there seeking something to pour water into and found that I was something to pour water into. I went there seeking tiny grains and seed. Blackbirds were wintering in my head and I had to feed them. We only need one cupboard, don’t we? We could keep it empty and closed […]
I tell my husband I would eat him if he was already dead and I was starving on some remote island without Kroger or canned food. I would eat the dogs, I say, I would eat my mother, whom I love most in the world. I’d cut off unessential parts of my flesh and cake […]
My chihuahua left me for some woman in Vinton. She took the bus across town. It wasn’t a dream like when you’re on the bus naked or on the bus drunk or there’s a woman beside you crocheting the face of your mother. Spice was happy on the bus, her whole body wagged. […]