Single life is-tequila with lime, / shots of travelers, jacks, diamonds, and then spades, / holding back aces- / mocking jokers / paraplegic aged tumblers of the night trip.…
With a red pen, the disease draws inside my abdomen a chain of volcanoes erupting on cue and rivers of lava sliding across organs, then hardening into rock, traces on my ovaries silhouettes of faces that will never be, scrawls on my uterus infinity symbols. The disease takes years to gestate. The disease claims dominion […]
two months at best the doc said, and we went home… —in drowning rain —in pregnant silence —in circular, useless thought * houseplants * * houseplants * * houseplants * (need watering) and we’re still out of milk… ‘better remember to— oh! a new lymphatic system! you need a new lymphatic system, too… ‘missing red […]
This much I know to be true: Hurricane Andrew made landfall near Homestead, FL, in the early morning of August 24, 1992. Winds reached 165 miles per hour at their height, aside from the resulting tornados, and the rainfall averaged eight inches in Miami-Dade County. Twenty-six people died nationwide as a direct result of the […]
The story in Lidia Yuknavitch’s national bestseller, The Small Backs of Children, is centered around a picture taken by a photographer on assignment in a war zone. The picture is of a young girl caught midair at the moment an explosion kills her entire family. The novel is a combination of sexual fairy tale, anti-cautionary […]
“Desperation is better than inspiration” I cannot write this blog. I have too many deadlines. Yet I will. I always do. I deliver. That’s my professional obligation. There is no can’t in this profession, there’s only must. As long as I’m still alive at the end of it all, the deadline is exactly what I […]
I want to die the way my dog sleeps / a tiny, take-up-no-room-curl. / I want to live like him, too, / rising twice or thrice a day, / a lift up from a stomach, / a grin to an n, / a head-to-tail unfurl…
The air is thick with ambivalence. The residue of those both forgotten and pushed away. A watchtower too certain of its own authority. The slow grating of a mechanical door granting one passage in and out of the yard. The dull gray of clothing rendering life invisible against a backdrop of concrete walls. Barbed wire […]
In the middling Alabama unpopular girls grow tall and firm given the cover of hundred-foot magnolia tree towers. Given limbs too thick to rustle, betray, or give a girl away. Make it so you can never look up and say it wasn’t me. Never say you are not the girl who wobbled into magnolia arms […]
I sit at a dinner table on the back patio of a French restaurant. It is a warm October night. The waiter has brought wine, a California Zinfandel, and subjected us to a short spiel—the soup of the day is a ginger carrot puree. It seems that everyone, six of us, loosely connected through friends […]
If monuments
are all that survive us,
if Palmyra,
dead for centuries,
is all that stands for beauty,
if, blind
(1) When sleep comes the cortège stops by cairns, tugs the silver cord, nearly always with ravens. Only here, snapped back to white chairs, dew, do I recover details—umbrella faces, black suits, cousins, hatchbacks, clunk shut. A day off school, same uniform, blazer apt. Puce curtains close. Organ music. Brother’s hand round my elbow. His […]
I lay in my daughter’s bed, where I’ve slept, for a long time awake with my eyes closed, thinking of all the essays I would rather write. I have drafts I want to work on, about birds and sharks and theme parks. I would rather write about foot fungus than write earnestly about marriage. I […]
one. after claire dies, i see her standing in my bedroom. when i look up from my book, she’s standing there, staring at me. her hair and clothes are wet and dripping, forming a puddle on the floor at the foot of my bed. her feet are bare. her blue nail polish is chipping. it […]
[flash fiction] After an argument that night in the grocery store over the merits of grass-fed cow’s milk, your lug-headed boyfriend told you to keep quiet, to take up less space, to become less noticeable. So you sucked your breath inward, purpling your skin from lack of oxygen and subtracting your sound from the universe. […]
“What is this place?” my father asked. “It’s Seattle, Dad,” I said. “From up high.” Lunch for two at the Space Needle’s revolving restaurant had seemed like a good idea when I’d wrested him away from his wife, Donna, that clear summer day. I’d hoped he’d be able to point out the marina where he’d […]
When cities are burning / and children sleep in your bed / you can’t measure suffering / like sugar, one tablespoon / at a time…
I try to write about rage, and old muck gets in the way. I’m obsessed with injuries past, dormant for a while, that are suddenly screaming for attention. I can’t get a damn thing done. I assume there’s a reason why they’re clamoring, so I may as well start digging. Our oven blew up about a […]
[flash fiction] Rivka Borek had plans to become the youngest ever five-time champion on Jeopardy! She told me this our third day at science camp, by which point I was completely in love with her. Rivka had thick curly hair, kind brown eyes, and fuchsia glasses that perfectly matched the brackets on her teeth, but […]
In fourth grade, my best friend Kimberly walked me—or rather, dragged me, my hunched body straggling two steps behind her—to Chamber Singer auditions. I’d started singing at six years old, and I idolized the girls and boys who traveled to Nashville and Atlanta and performed outside the Publix grocery store on Old Cutler. Our elementary […]
I lost my virginity while the dragon fell. When the enormous canvas beast faltered, people flocked beneath it. Maybe they hoped their attention would encourage it to stay aloft in the dead air, like zealots of a dying god refusing to believe its power could ever wane….
We write in order to be read. We compose our thoughts, create our scenarios, spin our tales to reach and touch our audience and to be understood. And when we do, we hope our writing has what Hollywood calls “legs.” Something that endures over time, that will keep on going, keep on running. In order […]
“Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.” – Sigmund Freud I find myself drawn to the writing of poets-turned-novelists, or poets-turned-memoirists. Michael Ondaatje, long before he wrote The English Patient or any of his other novels, was a poet, as one might glean from his prose. Who but a poet […]
“I trespass in abandoned houses. I spy on the people who once lived inside, watching them through the telescope of time…”
I stopped going to the dentist around the time I started needing gynecological exams. It was on the waning end of adolescence that first I felt an OB crank me open with a speculum for a look-see. I have a general aversion to exposure; I was, and still am, wary of being peered into. Tender […]
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work. — Gustave Flaubert For the past few months, I’ve been investigating what it means to “slow down” in order to support and deepen a viable creative practice. I’ve looked at adjusting rhythms of transport and control, […]
I’m in therapy for an abusive relationship, but I spend most of my weekly fifty-minutes cracking jokes for my psychologist. A few weeks ago she pointed out that I laugh whenever I reveal something that hurt me. “When your boyfriend shoved you, how did you feel?” she asked. “One time I kneed him in the […]
I recently taught a month-long intensive workshop called “Write Your Screenplay in Four Weeks” at St. John’s College in Santa Fe. I’m always struck by how much I learn about writing as I share my own process and watch others develop their own. All my collected rules of writing come into play not only when […]
The following three found poems are from the collection Roger That […]
In the downpour / a pair of cobras slithers / into the resort / and the restaurant empties / of foreigners. / The boy sets his tray of drinks / on a table and runs for the itak / he isn’t supposed to keep / in his locker, but does…
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