Eat Good for Me: An Essay on Your Late Mother’s Birthday
Cue that time you remember your mother is dead and it’s her birthday weekend, and you’re in a city where you don’t belong and you realize you did this on purpose and decide to take dead ma out to a brunch buffet like she used to take you. You think, …
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If We Clean, We Clean Each Other
You did an admirable job trying to hide your surprise when you opened the door and saw me standing there; most people blinked and glared or smiled too widely, looking like they’d lost their minds and were thinking of all the ways they’d like to murder me. But despite your …
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Enclosure
The howl spilled into the library. Through the window, it swept the stacks like fog, spreading along the floor before lifting to the ceiling. Two younger men looked at each other. They laughed nervously. An older woman with no chin sat at one of the computers and slowly typed how …
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Snow on Old Parishville Road, 1974
Most winter nights, my friend and I walked the lean back roads that curved and dipped away from town until we’d left campus lights behind. We walked past empty fields, past farms where ramshack meadows, ripe in summer with second growth, lay stilled by snow. We did not mind that …
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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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Reflection
Hours I’ve spent in river-smelling bathrooms, panning the glass for a hint of gold. Hating what was only light. Even my cat, when held to a mirror, knows that he isn’t in it, will pour nonplussed from my arms. It was harder for me to understand: the woman was representative. …
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Goodbye, Annie
It was too hot to be out, but no one complained because our good friend Annie was dead and we didn’t know how to talk about it. We sipped tall cans of sweet tea and ate unshelled peanuts, tossing their crepey husks in a vacant clay pot that once held …
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I <3 Loss
When I was eleven my mom said you’re so invisible, you should be a drug dealer. From then on, I knew I would be hard to get. I’ve been twenty-one for three weeks. My friend poked the word lucky into my wrist with a spare needle last night. I feel …
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Poseidon
My father demonstrated his power under the YMCA shower head, arms sharpened into points. Water rushed over fins, down fingertips in jets. At bedtime, he rocked me, a ship on calm seas as we sang the old songs. When he grew archaic—hurricanes. Kitchen chairs thrown, explosions into kindling. Blue sky …
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We Might Forget, But the Fields Remember
Summer is two weeks deep and already itchy with boredom when I suggest we poke around the abandoned house in the field. The bromegrass is half the height of the car and bends in supplication, tips wispy like cobwebs when it brushes our arms. We wade carefully, afraid of broken …
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