The Kale Gaze
I admit, I laughed . . . but there’s only so much . . . you can do . . . with kale . . . and I hate kale . . . almost as much . . . as the male gaze . . . pity our …
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Gallows Room
Translated from Saadi Youssef When I close my eyes a country falls into my palms, the country that taught me I have no name, a man fated to the nation’s shoe soles. (How many times have I been under the warden’s shoes?) I still bear a scar on my …
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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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Thank You for Staying With Me
Thank You for Staying With Me (University of Nebraska Press, 2025), Moore’s debut essay collection, traces a dizzying path through her abruptly ended Ozarks girlhood and the person she continues to become as a result. Her prose ranges from the traditionally structured to the very short (“Overkill”) to that …
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Conversations with Chairs
I admit I don’t know what her book’s about, this upholstery’s itchy, unkind, an asymmetrical design that hurts my brain hovering near the humming fluorescents, flagged hazardous by facilities management, mercurial. What does her womb look like through a lubricated transducer, bigger, honestly, than my vibrator? …
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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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The Organ
We’re driving to Newburg for a carburetor part, my father quiet as usual. I’m thankful to get out of the house. My mother, in her threadbare nightgown and worn pink toenails, shoving the vacuum around, grumbling about being a martyr, while the four of us kids deep in sofa …
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Force Majeure
This must be the house moving off its blocks. Hundreds of grackles drop, fold, rise, weave grace and collision as if every sorrow has slipped its yellow beak into the wind and wants me to hear. The breath I just took falls into the sink with an orange peel, …
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