On the one hand, they had been her friends for so long, whispering in her ears, telling her stories, reciting poems, not just the sorts of things you would expect, Sappho and Hesiod, but Auden, Eliot, Yeats—they liked the modernists— and Sylvia Plath, Adrianne Rich— they were eclectic in their tastes. Sometimes they had sung […]
A paper can be folded seven times. Each crease across my origami skin is sharp enough to slice. I’ve tried to thin my bones and sinews, ink myself in lines so small, so shrinking, safe to overlook— passed between palms, a secret note in school, crumpled and cast into a fire as fuel, […]
on a glass pond the silver swan dips its head and swallows tiny iron fish quick, jerking gulps someone carved each feather with forgotten techniques and the bird winds down over decades, gears growing blunt-edged and bent I put you on a pedestal where no rust could touch nor […]
Who do we think we’re kidding? As if the threshold was the infinitesimal, too— but spirit does linger. Bring honey, a black lamb, two firearms, and a woman’s dress, with the turning of the moon. Soon, I will turn thirty. Hope for the best. Hunting is my living, see, and I take away from this […]
Not ever to be born surely was the better choice! By cruel fate we’re torn. We lack a voice in our dreadful ends; we forever know and forever show the gods aren’t friends to any living thing…! Yet, though washed by sea, we also can’t be free of the constant sting, the deepest, […]
It’s complex, this idea of sorrow, this love of my son who is my husband, this one foot after another. Tomorrow is now, yesterday is when, never today. Moments wash away in morning’s mourning. Our children will know the shame of it, the blame of it, but the noose will not. It will work morning, […]
Years ago, they drove a spear of blackened wood through the base of my spine, and when the bleeding stopped my skin grew around it, like bark around an axe left buried in a tree it couldn’t kill. Why does a tree keep reaching towards the sun— doesn’t it know any other way? Now […]
I make the bed as my mother taught me, smoothing sheets corner to corner, curve to curve, crisp and white, smelling of bleach and the flowery sachets she stuffs into linen closets and cedar chests, as if she could trick those cramped and lightless spaces to bloom. I fluff the pillows, three sharp blows, the […]
I knew the horrific thickness beneath my skin the offensive heaviness of each organ I met again with my old ally hunger and felt grim satisfaction as my layers thinned to reveal hard bone but my cat, he did not approve when I was slow to feed him my gravity stronger though I weighed […]
Not a lustful fisherman— someone caught in the battle between man and nature as his eyes fill with ocean— but a small black boy dragging a stick against the evening shores of Grand Anse, Grenada. She is leaning against the pier post, in the sea, so he sees her human first: her dark skin, […]