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CW: harassment and pent-up rage then switching to konnichiwa, then getting mad that I keep walking. I act like I don’t hear, but of course I do, when you run out of greetings and follow up with words like bitch and cunt and then laughing […]

The dollhouse has a gaping hole on the side facing east, a four-inch hollow overlapping the first and second floors, its splintered edges stretching into the kitchen with the checkered floor and the bedroom with the rainbow rug and the canopy bed. The baseball that […]

I hear rummaging sounds coming from the backseat, where my daughter Essie is sitting. She’s brought a bunch of LEGOs in a Ziplock bag for the car ride and she’s fishing for pieces. It’s loud and annoying, but I don’t say anything. My mom gave […]

After “Swerve” by Brenda Miller I’m sorry we’ve never met. We could have met when I married your son 23 years ago. I wonder if you even knew he was getting married? You live in a small East Coast suburb where news of weddings travels […]

Our eyebrows were already weird by the time we met. We were not new, but we had not been waiting, either. We came trailing wedding rings, dildos, mortgages, baby bottles, prom dresses, surgical histories, seltzer makers, dead transmissions, at-home injection kits, rosary beads, old photographs […]

Limestone country, where the quarry growls in heat thunder over the fields: we’re driving to find the place Dad wanted his ashes interred. Tonight Mark and I bring the boys to a cabin so quiet we can hear the electric lines of the high pylons […]

Once upon a time, there was a mother and her son. They took the day to go to lunch, to a restaurant they had never been to before, yet had been wanting to try for ages. He was going to try french fries for the […]

Five. Grandfather teaches me how to hold a butterfly without crumpling its wings. He raises his red sweater arms high above his head and tells me to wait. The early July morning is humid. I rock between my feet, sweating and impatient. One butterfly sits […]

Time is a motherfucker. Time wears a belt of iron. But Arden’s words fall up. The sun a tickled curtain. She touches the throat of God. There is no God. She takes out the trash. The trees whisper: Victory is false. My heart is a […]

The time my Mom stayed home from work three days in a row, singing church hymns while rocking in Grandma’s old chair, holding me tight, to claim me back from the devil. The night she ran out the front door into the dusk screaming that […]

3:30 PM The faded reflection of your own face in your laptop screen as you sit in the passenger seat typing outside of your daughter’s elementary school. As you approach the words that you need, as you change the tense, change the tension by framing […]