(mac)ro(mic)

She will be white picket fences, white wall tires, she will be white robes, white hoods, flame-glow torches, rifle-crack from shooting range at dusk, she will be not that kind of neighborhood, she will be it doesn’t happen here, she will be yapping dogs chained […]

To some, it’s the cheap, last minute gift picked up from a distant father, idling through the display shelves of Dollar General. For Malcolm it was release. Grasped between his palms, it worked its underrated magic, trickling down the nerves of his fingers, a gentle […]

We weren’t friends, unless you count that week. Can a week be considered a friendship? And then it is heard from a great distance that at not quite 46, he’s dead, and it makes one reassess history, and its influences. I don’t recall who sneaked […]

The first time I let you touch my body, the sky is dark; the lights are off. I close my eyes, too, because intimacy feels easier this way. An inverse reaction between particles—or are they waves, or perhaps they are both, I can never remember—of […]

Dear Eloise,  My body lies over the ocean. My body lies over the sea. My body lies by the light of tonight’s grieving moon. It lies by proxy. It lies wherever and whenever it feels like it.  It’s also falling apart, my body. It’s failing. […]

Watching Jim Carrey on the Late Show with David Letterman (circa 2004), we agree that it takes a special man to make a crowd laugh by doing nothing—by just being there, existing, smiling the biggest smile we’ve ever seen. But Jim Carrey is able to […]

Waist deep in the slate gray waves of a Great Lake, a woman is wading. When the loss of Jacob becomes too heavy, she drifts out here to float. She steps into a blanket of seaweed, dips down, startled by a lone diving Tern. Remains […]

The parade of black, casseroles, gluey eyes, and lilting words ended. The house was silent and heavy, like a concrete fog seeping into each crevice and nook. “Is mom going to be ok?” my sister asked.  “Yes,” I lied. Mom roamed the halls, looking for […]

I began with a platitude. “James was one of the best people I knew.” That was always a good place to start, right? I swallowed and shuffled the papers in my hands. Of course, I had the whole eulogy memorized; I had practiced at least […]

It starts after she begins her new job working in the plant nursery, one month after you move in. You like how sexy she looks: hips shimmying, fingers tying apron strings in a bow behind her back. Inside the greenhouse, the heat is sweltering. There’s […]

They come in drunk, trying not to make too much noise stumbling through the dark single-wide. They think I’m asleep but I am only pretending. I was up right before I saw the headlights sweep across the fake wood paneling of the living room walls. […]

I honestly can’t believe I made it this far. I cannot believe that I’ve been walking for 25 miles. I can hardly believe I made it past mile 14 to begin with. I don’t really remember why I started walking, I vaguely remember that it […]