My wife asks me to leave the porch light on before bed. I ask if we are expecting guests; she says it’s to keep them away. There was a time a flame in a window was a welcome mat, a compass in the dark. Tradition has a way of unraveling the longer it lasts. Think candles […]

Summer in its simplest colors comes over Durling Avenue. The sweetest invitations come understated, the girl in the yard barely lifts her eyebrows, the boy shrugs his shoulders as if to say I’ve been waiting, I can wait. All we’re asked to do is recognize the beckoning—the grass splashed brown that will be cut by […]

Rolled up in my sheets, marinating in nervous sweat, +++++brain a flipbook: speed-painted images, words, phrases like ticker tape rolling on & on. I watch the crescent moon steadily sheathe its blade edge in a neighbor’s chimney. +++++Alarm clock says “4 AM.” +++++Hypothalamus says “Fuck this.” If I got out of bed now, I’d be […]

Levee workers, Plaquemines parish, Louisiana Fourteen Negroes wheel barrows along narrow planks laid over mud. They build a levee to prevent flooding of land they’ll never own. Fearing bites of cottonmouths, copperheads, and diamondbacks, they sweat in humid bayou heat. Arrayed along a nearby ridge, four white overseers look on in the shadow of a […]

Pack sackcloth and ashes in your carry-on. Bring pens, your toothbrush, a good skirt, and a magazine you will not read. At the terminal, do not flinch at his diminishment. You are not strong enough to support the weight of his grief. You will support it. Accept tasks before coffee, urgencies colliding, lists so long […]

Women gathered round the float like the waters of the night— nurses, pirates, schoolgirls in plaid—and they lifted shirts to necks and their breasts bobbed up and down. Beads of prayer fell upon them and hit their heads and throats and hearts. The women dropped to their knees to collect them—holy objects on sullied ground— […]