I’m supposed to be at my girlfriend’s. I had a pass for the weekend to go to her house for an early Christmas visit. But we had a fight and she got on the bus without me. She didn’t even look out the window as I waved, hoping she’d change her mind. There’s no way … Read more
I often wonder if your child leading other toddlers single file will march in circles round and round chubby legs and stoic frown signs written in crayon raised up high a whole two and a half feet pointing to the sky tiny fists beating tiny chests with not so tiny voices to protest the horrors … Read more
Rain in Los Angeles makes you think about all the lives you don’t lead, the times you didn’t move somewhere with four seasons, of girls who wanted you to follow them back to northern ancestral homes or jobs in fashion, of your parents wishing you lived around the corner for Sunday games and the inevitable … Read more
Now that I think back on it, I’ll bet every girl at Edgecomb knew about my affair with Denny Mackle, the college handyman. It’s hard to be private on a tiny campus jam-packed with three hundred post-pubescent Presbyterians. Having Winnie Foy for a roommate didn’t help, either. Winnie could spread gossip with the speed of … Read more
Unearthed after a long rain, worms stretch like wet band-aids across our yard. The dog takes her last swim before the pool is drained. Even as the water recedes, our father skims the surface with a tattered net, catches leaves from the neighbor’s trees. Here, where we practiced back strokes, flipped off the board, blessed … Read more
After my father died, I dreamt doctors could stitch someone back to life, bone by bone, breathe air into lungs, rub warmth into stiff limbs. He returned to me another man— an uneven gait, sunken steel eyes, and rubbery, damp hands. Clumsy with love, his speech was slurred. He was my pet; I fed him, … Read more
Calls on a highway home from her evening shift, where she sells clothes rich in silk and cashmere. Last year, I had a miscarriage. Her voice is thick with Kentucky, faith in her husband, her firstborn, and miracles. It turned to cancer. Her body loved the tumor, she says. Loved it so much her belly … Read more
The calm lunatics don their winding sheets and take to the streets to proclaim the inevitable, to sing requiems with tender fervor, to sweep their brooms at life’s debris, tick, tick, the dried leaves of loss and the wayward, crippled love and fear, both faint and staggering. The calm lunatics with stanzas in their eyes, … Read more
Bad little bird in the sky, seeking bones with a sneaky hunger. More insect than winged, more hornet than hawk. What do you know up there, tracing a path, should a child wander out from a gate? What hum will she hear before you deliver the mess of death? Mercedes Lawry has published poetry in … Read more
I feel for the edge with my toes. You are behind me, though I cannot hear your breath. I know something about your silence. The afternoon clouds are gloves of old cotton, the kind we wore to church. I am unsure of belief but I miss the dead, a host of them, a damn choir … Read more
Shown to be a slice of particular measure framed as construct, named as hour or minute. In the hands of the man at roof’s edge, maybe paper with mundane word, or gospel or small white field. Do birds take notice or mimic curiosity? The man might have forgotten the weight of bread crusts. Never fed … Read more
Shampagne we swiped from Meeks’ Country Store wasn’t champagne at all, but white grape juice, Welch’s, in a single serve bottle with a stained label, but out in the mid-seventies dark, running plowed-under tobacco fields, sparklers sputtering in our hands, we pretended, boasted, toasting each other as we passed the bottle between us, dirty-faced dreamers … Read more
And there was no dance, no holy place from which we were absent. ~Sappho Talk me down, if you can. There is so much to be dangerous about. There is that knowing that has shimmered just beyond me as long as I can remember, disarticulated light, shivers like streetlight glimmers on a hotel window. Below, … Read more
A man helped me out last night. He was small and dark-skinned, with short curly black hair and dark brown eyes. He wore black pants and a green sweater, with two white stripes running down each sleeve. I met him on my way home from work. His name was Rodrigo. I’d taken one of the … Read more
I carry my vows on my tongue so that I’ll choke before I break one. Such sudden, episodic deaths you’ve come to accept as a fact of your life now, just as you’ve accepted as facts my incurable sorrow and my need to make and make -believe. You know that I can’t help it if … Read more
Pripyat: Signs Oksana says the smallest creatures change most by what passes through them, to watch for signs. Hirundo rustica– the brown barn swallow’s feathers blanch albino like a dove, counterfeiting hope. Hairs along the purple spiderwort’s stamen blush pink with invisible current.Jonathan Travelstead served in the Air Force National Guard for six years as … Read more
Sitting across from me at the dinner table two weeks into our marriage, my husband Norm scrutinized Popular Electronics, grinning as if he’d found the secret to happiness. Must’ve been 1959. I asked if he wanted more cauliflower and for the first time noticed a small birthmark shaped like Iceland on his prematurely bald scalp. … Read more
Two-and-a-half decades too late for 1977’s glorious outbursts; do you remember how the opening guitar riffs of the Clash’s “I Fought the Law” sent audio-orgasms into our ear canals? We were black leather-clad, bandolier-adorned, plaid skirt-wearing, combat boot-fitted seventeen-year-old misfits huddled over a set of tinny Sony headphones in a backwoods high school’s cramped girls’ … Read more
