A Pound of Cure
I went to the street market with my grandmother every Sunday until I turned sixteen, when I didn’t understand her as anything other than grandma and mam, and her big voice felt like Moses splitting the sky to make room for the two of us. We’d see folks from …
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Coney Island Babies
The mothers hugged their boys close in the summer, afraid to let them wander in the sun of a world still alien to them. The fathers, out of habit, drew lines around the building, confining them to their narrow apartments. They closed windows and made it so the boys …
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Room for Owls
I drop two Tasty-Tarts into the toaster and look out my kitchen window. The sun makes a blue line over the hill. Dew is on the grass. I can still hear the song from my dream, and I’m happy. Minutes before, I was inside a cruise ship, wearing …
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Buddy and the Moon
A small bottle of dust sits on my grandfather’s desk, fractals of pale blue and silver catching the sunlight. It’s got a yellowing label on it: moondust. His desk is in the attic, facing the window to his backyard. I can see the old greenhouse from here, where he …
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Truck Stop
The A/C died with the automotive equivalent of a death rattle, a couple of clanky coughs and then breeze-free silence. I lowered the windows, and thick heat filled the cab at eighty miles an hour. I reached for the thermos I filled at Double D’s in Asheville after leaving …
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Cold Engine
Breath recedes on the windowpane. Almost March but the world shows no signs of letting up. Didn’t take the meat out of the freezer at the right time, so now we have to wait for it to thaw. One of these days I’m gonna drive this piece …
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Someplace I Didn’t Know
for Laura Trussell cw: brief mention of self-harm We were young, all done with college—either finished or dropped out. We lived on one of the long, treeless streets of Baltimore that flow down to the harbor in a three-story, five-bedroom rowhouse that the landlady had not raised the rent …
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Sonny Boy
cw: abuse Grandmother always has a crochet hook in her hand. Yellow yarn in a loop, memory beaten into muscle. The day I am born, in photos taken on cheap disposables at the hospital, blue yarn knotted into a baby blanket. When I am sixteen, the same color from the …
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Apple and the Destination Wedding
The month before my brother’s wedding, my roommate adopted a hairless cat. “Adopted” is a generous word. He obtained a cat—off Craigslist, I think—from some guy whose daughter both begged for and lost interest in the cat within two months. My roommate was kind of a hoarder. Newspapers …
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Myrmecomorphy
Fern stands in the church pew wearing her floral Sunday dress. Large peonies blossom across the fabric. Her soprano voice is absorbed by the congregation’s rendition of “As the Deer.” The chapel is full. A fan wafts sweat and rose oil in circles above the parishioners. Fern mindlessly rubs …
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