(mac)ro(mic)

Few can do it, but I’ve gotten the perfect level of drunk for karaoke. Paced myself and now I am feeling the right amount of bold, horny, irreverent, and ultimately nihilistic. I am ready.  I make eyes with the guy running the mic and he […]

Dear Josh, Today, I pulled my A&W mug down from a cabinet. There was a dead spider in it, a thick coating of dust on the rim. It’s been thirty years this spring since I stole that beveled glass mug, thirty years since I saw […]

We drift in and out of the room like it’s ours, like it doesn’t belong to Haley. We caress the O-Town poster and dream that the guys would come to life so we could entertain them in our room. The one with bead bracelets on […]

The music came with a steady beat of swinging arms and staring eyes. I was a child. I felt insecure, out of tune, awkward. I wanted to disappear, to hide from the hum and the heat. You drew me out of the dark corners of […]

Of course I want to go back and capture that night in that mason jar, the one with former lives holding pickled apples, apple cider, homemade wine. I would have mixed up the fireflies that danced outside your bedroom with the Everclear mixture spiked with […]

“Two days of snow, two flashes in the sky, I know the world ends, but I do not yearn.” – Matteo Tafuri, 1492-1582 When the ice froze for the last time, Persephone walked out on it. In the middle of another ash-dark night she’d heard […]

When your mother takes ill – the outcome of being bitten by a rogue mosquito – and temporarily retires from the kitchen, you set out to acquaint yourself with the myriad occupants of her fiefdom. Far from easy. There are two rows of identical steel […]

imagine the faded polaroid: january 2000, a beach. rippled sand waves, still water. picture me: twenty years old (terrified) and eight months pregnant. my cousin works for united airlines, so we fly standby to san diego for a last hurrah! before i (officially) become a […]

The first time my sister talked about running away was when our stepmother gave us dolls’ clothes she’d sewn from scraps of our mother’s bath robe. When my sister had ripped them at their tiny seams and cried, Jane had called her ungrateful and said […]

 “So far as we know, all the fundamental laws of physics, such as Newton’s equations, are reversible. Then where does irreversibility come from?…Why is it that the situations we find ourselves in every day are always out of equilibrium?” — Richard Feynman, Feynman Lectures on […]

Sami’s mom has Sami’s bed facing away from the door because that’s how the devil enters your body when you are asleep and the devil would like nothing better than to possess a girl like you from your toes right on up to your head. […]

At some point in the conversation, Jena could no longer understand what her boss was saying. Sorry. Her former boss. Once she heard the word “downsizing,” her ears clogged up, as if there were chunks of bread stuffed inside the canals. Everything muffled and unbelievable […]