They stood in the faculty lounge sipping coffee. Outside, palm trees swayed in the breeze. Inside, women pursed their lips and men tugged on their sleeves. The object of their discussion had long since left the room. The air was stuffy. Someone opened a window. “It’s not that I don’t have a great deal of … Read more
The gun slides back in the drawer the phone rang and I thought my daughter was still alive, stranded on the side of the road with a busted timing belt except there was no sound on the other end of the line. The gun slides back in the drawer and the edges of frosty windows … Read more
“I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do.” -Maggie Nelson, Bluets Dear Loneliness, I feel like a crow-black-wingéd thing. Today marks one year. I tally the days like evidence. I do not know why, or what spherical time patterns do to … Read more
Riding the bus after another day on the same job, caged in the same cubicle where neglected books and paper piles gather dust years deep, I do not feel better knowing it could be worse. Getting off at the bus stop, I ache for my friend stricken by Lou Gehrig’s disease and the coming day … Read more
I don’t want to talk about how rare you are – how you’re far too grand, far too human. I want to talk about the tempest you’ve conjured between my thighs that stings as much as any abrasion on the skin when you’re absent. How you whittle me away into a convex shape with one … Read more
It wasn’t like any gimmick could stop me. I was the fifth train car, that field down the road. You said you knew what to trace – that synapses were defunct. And it’s not like that war could have stopped you. Tonight you’ll play the victor in some other fuck-up, while I watch, as always, … Read more
Above ground between the wheel ruts one dead mole, dark as the earth it turns to, fur soft as ash, against the gray basalt – others claw below ground. Römhild Work Education Camp, 1944Irena Praitis is the author of six books, most recently One Woman’s Life (Diversion Press, 2010), Straws and Shadows (Moon Tide Press, … Read more
The mountain will bask, sun-warmed and green, in the summer we won’t see. The local innkeeper once advertised a fairy grotto in the sand cave where we store shovels to bury our dead. Beyond the barbed wire, gold leaves spin through shafts of sunlight. Leaves, not snow. How we will ache when it comes, from … Read more
They shave your head, line you up under their perforated-pipe shower, peck at you on your crawl toward roll call. They scratch your number in their ledger, stack your clogs, striped trousers, a rag- patched shirt, one round cap. Laundered in another era, threadbare, who’d wear these clothes—prisoners? Criminals? Men like you? We all need … Read more
Wish you were here I mean, not dead me bored on our weekly phone chats, you babbled about the latest bistro, café, winebar on Montague street in Brooklyn and did I remember the Arabic grocery store on Atlantic Avenue? I did. We bought cans of tahini and packets of pine nuts and went home and … Read more
Dr. Z.P., the distinguished psychologist, likes adages. He cites them in Latin, French, English, and his native Polish. He quotes them from ancient authors and from himself. AFFECT LEADS, INTELLECT FOLLOWS is the motto I find spelled out under the image of a Rorschach inkblot, rendered in needlepoint, and hung on his stairway. It is … Read more
After their first child killed herself, the cranes studied all the right books, heads trembling each night as though struggling against some ash-covered morsel working its way down the throat. They treated their remaining daughter the best they could, following the advice of experts: staying tough, no treats unearned, hoping for some sky-road past the … Read more
at the Temple Sagrada Família in Barcelona His thoughts on a nascent spire, Antonio Gaudí steps in front of a speeding tram. He left no blueprints of the temple, only models made of birdshot and clay, whorls to mimic nature’s forms. Eight decades later, staircases corkscrew nowhere as carpenters rev saws and guess the curves … Read more
First position: Your feet behind your mother’s waist, dangling. Music is playing. Your body rests in her arms, your head on her shoulder, your eyes closed. You sway and spin, breathing in and out of gentle pirouettes, dreaming toward the eventual dip into deeper sleep, adagio, adagio, where you remain elevated, where your ankles have … Read more
Decide now, before the next breath, that there is nothing to lose – do it again with the next, and again for summers in winter, till breathing is exposure and expression is breathing Till every pocket is emptied and inside is out and outside is not and mandalas bloom Till the last exhale of the … Read more
Two Hawks Quarterly Editors, Spring 2016 Pictured left to right: Rachel Tenorio, Will Stegemann, Nick Wenzel, Deborah A. Lott, Meg Burby, Amy Ballard, and Ashley Okonma Two Hawks Quarterly Editorial Consultants Deborah A. Lott, M.F.A. Deborah A. Lott is the author of the book In Session. Her creative nonfiction has been published widely in literary journals … Read more
In the fields, a girl stumbles on the remains of an antelope. She was hoping for gnomes or gold, not a skull nestled between a rock and a clump of paintbrush as if deliberately composed by some amateur painter. The flesh long since plucked clean by scavengers who, once full, disbanded to stash each bone … Read more
They submit, let the current take them, their bodies a tangle of elbows and knees that smack against the portable pool. In the desert, every ounce of water is coveted. Kids slosh in every direction, oblivious why soil beyond the plush green lawn cracks. On the Pacific, miles of beaches shift, claim entire towns, playgrounds … Read more
After the last house is lifted onto the truck, dust swirls, chokes workers as they lash the final frame in place, the building left wobbling in the middle of the street uncertain of its new foundation. The front door unlocked as if anyone could just climb up and walk inside. Tire tracks left behind soon … Read more
after “Die Jahre” by Goethe If not for oil, the town would’ve never existed, would not have sprung from barren soil. The years brought families, brought water, pipes entrenched for miles beneath the ground. Frayed power lines hang from poles lashed to homes that emerge from nothing. Then, as if the town changed its mind, … Read more
Understand that everyone bathes differently. When you’re fat and in a bath, every movement becomes an event, and every event occurs on the surface. This is not Shamu’s pool, and though you wish to dive, to flatten yourself under water, to decrease the amount of curvage peaked above, realize it will prove impossible. You are … Read more
It’s funny, the things you remember and the things you forget. For instance, I can’t recall what day it was, exactly; I just know it was a warmish evening in June. And I have no clue if I was wearing a sundress or a nightgown or if I’d gotten my braces off yet, but I … Read more
Shortly before my 37th birthday, my husband, Garrett, and I decided to go to Nicaragua, also known as the land of volcanoes and lakes. We built our trip around a two-day, 20-mile hike up a volcano called El Hoyo in order to see as much of the former as possible. To prepare, we wiped cobwebs … Read more
An 8-year-old girl and her 7-year-old brother died after getting trapped in a hope chest in their home. ―NBC News It started as a simple game of hide-and-seek, a father watching television as his two children raced up the stairs on little hands and feet. The mother still stuck at work while her kids played … Read more
Time is the accumulation of all things, only in the way dust whirls through an abandoned parking lot, clogs the wheel well of a rusted pickup truck. Trying to distinguish one noise from another; a rabble of crows hunched over on a barbed wire fence, their oil- dipped beaks & feathers slick with fluorescent, orange … Read more
