A whirring, choking noise, like a spoon caught in a garbage disposal, erupts from my John Deere. I cut the engine, pull back. A half-chewed bone protrudes from a mound of Georgia red clay. At least it’s not a pile of dried dog shit. When that stuff gets up in the blades it spews out […]
My daughter, Angie, splashes in the swimming pool one minute, then jumps into the hot tub the next minute, at our rented beach house in Kea’au, a tiny town on the eastern side of Hawaii’s Big Island. Afternoon clouds break as she goes from one extreme to the other, sending herself into alternating fits of […]
Out where the streams etch away from Devil’s Head, out of the bear’s coarse fur, shot in the back over in the bushes in hours before dawn when we were afraid of the wounded, afraid of this shape pulled down from the stars, when we were neighbors on the road to Harmony, up late every […]
[fiction] The Bank of Michigan gave my grandfather a banquet at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island in the late seventies. While my parents watched television, I snuck out of the hotel room to explore. Almost immediately, I found myself locked out of the fire escape seven stories up. At seven years old, I pounded […]
Shaving’s my contribution to society. Like, who needs a brown guy with a beard sitting next to them on the plane these days, you know? Look, no beard, I come in peace brother. Wrong word! Beep. Don’t say brother. Like ever. You don’t want them looking at your backpack. Whatever. So I shaved this morning, […]
Violet and Sydney Schiff were an extremely sophisticated English couple, rich, cultured and cosmopolitan, who moved between London and Paris. He was a translator and writer, using the pseudonym Stephen Hudson, but first and foremost he was a patron of the arts, on friendly terms with Modernism’s greatest talents. She was an elegant and captivating […]
Danny was always looking hard at everything, but at the moment he was looking especially hard at Carly the Carp, who had the knife in hand and at-the-ready for oblivious violence. That’s all it took to kick the music off in his head. Bongos carried the wobbly melody along, thudding and thumping deep in his […]
Visiting into the night, a dog found a buck sprawled onto the back porch of her home, lung pierced and bubbling a thick stripe onto its side. A creature of this type usually dies in the woods. Something about the leaves: they dance a soul to sleep. Yet, somehow, this hulk of hide had found […]
[creative nonfiction] Silly girls. We were two American college co-eds, surrounded by big, jovial mountain climbers from Norway. Or Sweden. We couldn’t understand them. The young bearded men were heavily into their schnapps and laughed as they tried, with hand gestures and broken English, to convince us to join them in a shot, or two. […]
Leslie thought about lighting a candle as the sun set, tinting her bedroom with a dimming tangerine glow, but she was down to her last box of matches and didn’t want to ask Alan for more. After twelve days of general quarantine, the electricity had gone out when too few workers could make it to […]
When I say the tree was hollow, I do not mean the trunk of it. No, the trunk was sturdy and new. Instead, the branches grew in all directions, even along the ground, spreading feverishly, so that there was a space inside where you could sit and talk, feet dangling off the ground, like being […]
[fiction] The first boy she ever kissed was actually two. Behind the heavy velvet curtains on the stage at the community center. It was summer; they were counselors who ignored their campers, who smoked the dried-up weed she had found in her brother’s dresser, smoked it behind the dumpster during lunch, crouching to avoid the […]
Night, and your absent memory crept into my heart As in a wasteland, spring blossoms quietly As in a desert, the zephyr sways gently As to a dying man, relief comes, unexpectedly. Rubai Raat yuuñ dil meñ tirī khoī huī yaad aa.ī Jaise vīrāne meñ chupke se bahār aa jaa.e Jaise sahrāoñ meñ […]
Green signs loom over I-80, beckoning us towards Omaha; it’s difficult not to exit downtown to the Courtyard Marriott, tell them we want our old room so we could pretend we’re still new at this. I could still get butterflies when he emerges from the bathroom in a shirt and tie, flash-forwarding to the man […]
There must be a Yiddish word for the birds chittering in the bare bushes ablaze with the life of their voices; though their bodies blend with branches their voices belie nothing. My mother’s of course I will I want sew themselves through the fabric of […]
In the shower, I let the hot water rinse out the blood, the tremors in my fingers quieting. I have a nice stack of scars and I wonder if they’ll still be there when I’m old, if I make it to old, and what I’ll tell my children or grandchildren when they ask me what they are. Maybe I’ll tell them that I was a knife juggler. They’ll like that. …
If memory is talisman, this I hold in my palm: my father strides, back straight and face serious, to the edge of the pool. It’s a late summer day. Children of other families splash and shout, a cooling breeze chases the sun. My father is sturdy, not fat and not thin, handsome with wavy dark […]
[fiction] I’m just appreciating what’s pleasing about Trent when it all goes wrong. He phones me, his voice less sweet and friendly than it was an hour ago. There’s a crackle of anxiety present now. “Den…” he says. After he’s spoken my name there is a sharp little silence. I break it with a sigh. […]
A sin of beauty is a toy forever: I transgress; I jumble up words, fumble for the right age, mislabel Keats for Yeats, bumble between the present tense and the past tense. For elegance, for beauty, for my inflexible desire, I dismiss faithfulness and disable meaning. I mistranslate flyable twilight as an unshakable rock in […]
In our last conversation, he sat
on a milk crate, held the unlit
cigarette like a fountain pen,
and kept tapping the filter against
his weak heart. …
Sister My sister is sitting on the bank of a ploughed field, catching the last grains like fish. The black earth is agitated, spattering poisonous salt throwing foam beneath the blackthorn bush. I go up to her, bent and old, sobbing, so she pities me, saying, “Look, I’m cold, I’ll die.” And she answers me, […]
[fiction] Kolarov started watching Longmire on Netflix last winter while engaging in half-hearted workouts on the bike trainer. The show has begun to own him. Kolarov is an IT guy, the dude you see in the office wearing a blue polo shirt and khaki pants, pushing a cart loaded with computers. That was before Longmire. […]
My brother Mark is the essence of juvey cool, hair slicked back in a perfect duck’s ass, white T-shirt with a pack of Camels rolled up in one sleeve, Levis like the skin he was born in, pointy-toed shoes that the Mexican kids call cockroach killers. He is sixteen, months from dropping out of high […]
Today: “Ms. Rolfe, are you dying?” This isn’t the first time a student has asked me this after I had a coughing fit in class. In fact, I get asked this all the time. Too often. And I’m used to it. But today, I am hanging on by a thread. I have trouble walking up […]
[fiction] A lady of leisure, Leela spent most of her time reading novels and literary magazines. She sat on the terrace, gazing at the white sailboats in the sapphire waters of Bay of Bengal, drying her long, lustrous hair in the bright sunshine, bantering with her sisters-in-law. Leela never went downstairs for breakfast until after […]
1 The ogre is bad-tempered He throws a fit Hurling rotten stones Giant stale rocks, to be more precise The ogre wants fresh stones And the dream doesn’t leave him alone: I want stones Timely stones My exhaustion wants them Living stones Stones that break away from your seconds fall over me Stones that pour […]
in the 1960s The name itself is a kingdom brambled over in exotics, where fish & birds read like orchids, and an oil-flat sea’s gone dull beside a land possessed of its own drumbeat—fist to heart, a howled & primal green. After all, Amazon sounds more tribal than rivered. Venezuela, its new language an assignation […]
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