Descent, Interrupted
cw: suicidal ideation It is the spring semester of your senior year. Sunlight warms the sidewalk, damp with dark patches of melted slush. You hook your thumbs into the straps of your backpack and walk to campus. You’re in the center of Standish Park, a square block of benches …
Read More
Beauty
Your fabric obsession leads you to buy the largest girls’ dress left in stock, just to get your hands on that gorgeous mod-Scandi floral print. You have always hidden behind bright patterns and A-line dresses that obscured your protruding gut, unsculpted shoulders, thighs that embrace like lovers. And as hard …
Read More
Slice, Snap, Smash, Crunch, Puncture, Mash, Split, Splinter, Chop, Mangle, Macerate, Mince, Shatter, Pulverize, and Amputate: 15 Ways to Lose a Finger
Just in from the henhouse and garden with fresh eggs and a summer-plump tomato for a breakfast omelet, you use your sharpest knife to slice the tomato thin. You look up at the chickadee at the feeder out the window. Replacing lichened stones that have toppled from the rock wall …
Read More
Teeth: A Brief Personal and Natural History
My parents never smiled with their mouths open for pictures when we were kids. Their teeth were crooked, and a few were missing. My brother and I had crooked teeth, too, riddled with cavities. We learned early to close our mouths for the camera, but sometimes, we forgot. Dad’s dental …
Read More
Shine on Harvest Moon
Shine on Harvest Moon And who knows, anything can happen, during the harvest moon if I survive that long. In montauk, over the waters that turn green, then, blue, then white like the irises of lavender flowers that blossom in your upturned eyes, and the stores, cafes, restaurants, grocery shops, …
Read More
Ways of Falling
Repetitiously A dream that I dream repeatedly: The Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) stops building the I-35W Bridge. Instead of a crossing that straddles the open air above the Mississippi, MnDOT builds a tunnel under the river. As is the way of dreams, the distortion of reality plays out like …
Read More
Mapping the Sinister
I. My right side always hurts. First, my wrist: ligaments too floppy. Then my hip: the ball joint misshapen so that it rubs against the socket, tearing the protective labrum between. The hip pain spreads to my knee: I can’t hike down a steep hill without a sharp, stabbing sensation. …
Read More
The Expectation
One childhood summer morning in Maine by the lake, I lay in my top bunk studying the creatures formed by knots in the pine board walls. One resembled a bat spreading its wings, another a bull snorting out steam. I contemplated the knots like puzzles, just awake in that time …
Read More
A Matter of Taste
First day, near the end of a one-hour dive rotation. No sharks. A November plankton bloom has reduced viz to 20 feet, if that. Vastness of the sea compressed tight around the shark cage. These waters of Isla Guadalupe are known for their clarity, like an inverted sky, you were …
Read More
Circled by Sun
The sun is my drug. The light spirals the ice sheet and fades only with clouds and thick storms and wind that howls. I could stay awake through this longest of southern days. I could stare into the yellow tent fabric flapping frosted condensation onto my sleeping bag. I could …
Read More