The Hybridity of Fear: A Lyric Essay
Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson 1. This morning Madam Marie Curie tells me nothing in life is to be feared, only understood. Her radioactive words in my email claim: Now is the time to understand more, so that …
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Bystander
Third grade. R. For years, he was just a boy on my bus, a boy other boys teased, a whiny boy. R—who lived less than a mile from my house, on a farm—was a boy I avoided. Then one afternoon, my mother offered to give him a ride home from …
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The French Pimp
My grandfather collected antique clocks, so there were several in every room of the house. My favorite was a graceful, black marble mantel clock that lived over the living-room fireplace. Other clocks rang the half, or even the quarter-hour, with a Westminster chime heard all around the house. But the …
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Scripted History (Rx Hx)
Lithium I was nine when I began reading prescription labels. My mother kept the lithium in a slender cabinet beside the refrigerator. Either of my two brothers or I could have grabbed the bottle when reaching for the salt. I appreciated the cadence of the word, lithium. I repeated it with …
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The Red Dot That Ends the Sentence
(a micro memoir moon cycle) When you get your period, says my dad at his house across the drafty, finished attic, let me know if you need to purchase Kotex or something. I stare at the floor, the southern sun shining through a four-pane window. I am 12. I am …
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All the Binding I Can Offer
for Tania Here’s the thick paste some kids used to taste in kindergarten. Here’s the glue we later spread over our fingers and peeled off like a second skin. Here are Sesame Street band-aids, ace bandages, arm slings, and Sharpie-signed casts. Here’s some tape: Scotch, double-sided, masking, blue. Here’s the …
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to whom it may concern:
My daughter will not be in school today. Please excuse my daughter’s absence from class today because she will be I am not well she is not well sick. Please excuse my daughter from class today because she is sick. I will be taking her to the doctor. keeping her home. …
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a pedagogy for lesser bodies
My husband kicks our dachshund puppy out the back door because she has peed a quarter size puddle on the living room carpet. At less than a few months old, this mishap was to be expected. Nevertheless, he rustled her to the back door, scooped her up with his foot, …
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New Vows
That day, the sun rose into the morning like honeycomb sliding off a hot knife, filling the haze with a buttery, oneiric glow. We ran down the hill, eager and full, words heavy and sweet spilling out of our mouths. Time slipped through our damp fingers like opalescent minnows in …
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Lightning
It is evening. Summer. A thin blue settles across my grandparents’ house. No lamps are switched on yet. Everyone is visiting out back where the cicadas have begun sawing when a phone rings loudly into the muffled dusk. Either Dad answers or someone else picks up and hands him the …
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