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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Between Them
MacArthur The train squeals to a stop as it nears the station. A dozen passengers exit, buds in ears and cellphones in hands. My mother, father, and I enter, their tickets in my hand. They head straight for the seats reserved for the elderly and infirm, two words that make …
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The River Stories of a Ghost
I had always thought that there were no ghosts in my family, until I saw her face looking back at me in a black and white family portrait. I could identify everyone in the frame— Grandma and all three of her younger sisters, my great-grandmother, and great-grandfather—but not the teenage …
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A Love Poem (tiburónes y gotas de lluvia)
I wanted to write a love poem and, like all good love poems, this one started with a surgeon sawing my corneas into flaps and shredding my lenses. My senses—sensitive—were overwhelmed. But maybe both love and surgeries are like that: open heart/open eyes? The reasons for my eye surgery are, …
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Moon Aching Song
Singing softly now from your altar of stone and staring from cold caverns far away yet somehow close and intimate like a sigh or breath from the one I love lying next to me, moon aching song almost full but rounded as a tear, as hip bone of woman or …
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