A Spectrum is a Ray of Light
Question 1: Is it difficult for you to understand what people are feeling just by observing facial expressions? There’s a blind spot on Reigerts Road, a dead zone at the peak of a high-sloping hill where two cars traveling in opposite directions cannot see if a stray vehicle …
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look it’s a mango
frida got mad at a dove today, had to dig a hole about it in the shade of a gambel oak my mom believes is an elm. i don’t know how to convince her i know anything at all, i show her acorns. she tells me how at nine …
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Caleb
It wasn’t until I saw Mama’s arm broken stupid, clean bone catching the light, the blood pink on the broken skin that I began to believe in God, or rather in his capacity to break shit. Maybe all He knows is how to break women like my father knows …
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Wherefore
Buttons were a problem. My back hurt. I said to the surgeon, take these breasts away from me. I wanted to leave something of my twenties in the biowaste bin. I wanted to welcome my reflection, which is to say I was not yet clear of naïveté. I caught …
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The Buzzing Means That Mom’s Back
May. Cicadas emerge from the earth, glistening and horny and pissed as all hell. Everyone loves to hate on cicadas, but Cenna’s dislike is more specific. Cicadas mean summer. She doesn’t trust summer. Sure enough, on the Friday before Memorial Day, her older sister calls. “Guess who’s …
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The Shed
When I was a girl, I was enthralled with butterflies. Their stately names—monarch, viceroy, painted lady—each sounded to me more like royalty than biology. I wished sometimes I could become one, unfurl kaleidoscope wings and float off into some other world, light as breath. And so I spent …
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Days Before the Birth of Drumming
The son I fathered two lifetimes ago rarely visits anymore Not in the form of dancing blue spheres Nor as a curve billed thresher going on and on about the war with far too few ceasefires and all the lambs we slaughtered together because death isn’t a guest but …
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Lift
Two scooter girls in Easter-egg helmets kneel at a suspension bridge edge. Shoulder to shoulder, they spin combination locks, racing to feel the release. Below, a shirtless boy wades into the river. His mother, on a boulder, reaches out. A swallow darts by. Concrete shifts. Cables grind rust into …
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