Shelf Space
By the time I got down there, there were so many empty shelves in the Cape Coral house it looked like some beachy gift shop in foreclosure. My parents always planned to do Florida for retirement: a golf course, drives to the beach, Dine-N-Dance nights. Dad was fifty-five when he …
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Now, You Tell Me Something
As a child, I once poured a heap of table salt onto a brown slug, watched it partially dissolve, then used a stick to slough off its damaged skin. Somewhere, I’d heard that slugs don’t like salt. (I want to tell you something about living: Regrets come like mosquitos, nagging …
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From These Same Woods
November evenings, I waited at the window for my father to return from the woods. When I heard his truck rumbling up the hill, long after dark, I held the curtains open. He always backed into our semi-circle driveway, and usually the bed of his truck was empty. But some …
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Jay Shree Krishna, Jesus Christ
Sunlight filters through the stained glass windows amidst the tall columns supporting the ceiling of Iglesia de la Merced—built in 1534 by the Spanish conquerors of Nicaragua—and illuminates the altar of Virgen de Fatima. I find my mother there, standing before a giant sculpture of the crucifixion. The Son on …
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Jazz and Life and the Other Sorts
Jazz’s analgesic, a loud lullaby of unhomed birds tweeting loss from the ugly side of paradise; a quarrelsome tide, an endless sigh, a wildfire, the groans of the boys who blacked out in chain gangs in plantations in human zoos, half-faces of the girls who wrapped their laughter in tignons …
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a lake is still a lake
The rice and chicken are still in the fridge. The mold has sprouted butterfly wings. It has mapped out a continent. The dark underbelly is dotted with white eyes. I caress the soft sponginess and make sure I put back the napkin over the last meal my grandfather sent me. …
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talisman and bubble
Between November 1938 and the start of World War II in September 1939, a rescue effort known as the Kindertransport organized the evacuation of 9,354 children from Nazi Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia to safety in Great Britain. They were sent alone, without their parents, and were forbidden from bringing anything …
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toilet & stool
It is commonly believed that the sitting toilet was invented by the English plumber Thomas Crapper in the 1860s. But the modern chair-like water closet is correctly attributed to English plumber John Harrington, who built one for himself and his godmother, Elizabeth I. Inside throne a queen could call …
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Tennessee
Tennessee, you keep taking my socks each time I do laundry. Every week, I have to buy a new package. Striped or plaid, it doesn’t matter, they will all be eaten by your machine. Bundles of cotton that protect my feet from my shoes which protect my socks from the …
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Tilework Illustration of Fox Among Grapevines
The yolk’s lush on the fox’s dark tongue— mosaic of shell in the dirt —all the generations come down to this bright furrow. They built us a nest, no promise of security only a hope for it. We were only ever invisible when our mothers hovered over us, but now, …
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