Morphology
What would I know of being a mother. For a month, it has rained. I wait to be rid of it. When I dream it is of a bell, an animal split from the yoke. I wake in a pool of milk. Another attempt to fill the absence. …
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How To Get Dressed
cw: anxiety and sensory dysregulation Before you became a dress hanging in E’s closet, you were born on a conveyor belt. You watched identical kin as they disappeared down the line and wondered how they came to be. They were you, but not. Needles poked your neck, round and round, …
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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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Reduce, Recycle, Reuse
An elderly Vietnamese man goes through our trash daily. No gloves, no concerns. He walks up our driveway, opens the lid of the big, blue recycling bin, and makes me feel bad for discarding what is valuable. I’ve seen him on and off over the five years since we …
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Beloved Disciple
after Plautilla Nelli’s The Last Supper, c. 1560 (thought to be the first Last Supper painting done by a woman, with Nelli using other nuns as models) Again she has us all dressed up as men, the best of men, …
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Cherubs
remember a time before weathervanes, before lawns, before the sun made dew sizzle on leaves. They giggled at Eve as she reached for the fruit, unquivered their arrows. In the paintings, their knees are the color of unnamed roses; dark purple, damp mauve, bruises swaddled …
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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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Arc and Inverse
for Richard Serra I wasn’t there but heard that from the bridge he slid paints down and into, shading the water. The middle clarified to a tongue of alizarin and cerulean, colors he no longer needed. After paints, he dropped brushes to the dark taste of river: …
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Sadness, Followed by Anger
Grief This is a picture of a picture of a family in the waiting room perched on plastic chairs just inside the sliding doors. They will not answer because you do not call their names. You watch them, frozen in this slice of time: phones to ears, to tell …
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