(mac)ro(mic)

For much of the past year, I have been obsessed with sitting. How to do it, for how long, in what permutations.  Currently, I sit by the corner of the dining table to write. My legs are splayed open at a 90-degree angle, perpendicular to […]

Fry While you were in the store, I sat in the car, taking advantage of the air conditioning, radio, and lack of people. From my comfortable chair, I watched two crows fighting over what appeared to be an old french fry. Then the fry hopped, […]

We were drunk at the Wawa, how embarrassing, but also exhilarating. You and I, fifteen, pinkie-sworn BFFs, wrists corded with neon bracelets, black chipped nail polish, maybe we had braces, I’ll never tell (again too embarrassing), but then you shot gunned a beer in the […]

Toasting Each doorstep-thick slice impaled on a long fork licked by flickering orange flames, I toast bread over an open fire while Nan fetches butter from the pantry meat-safe. Cut from stoic cloth, she raised fifteen children in this tiny house, witnessed two World Wars […]

A half-finished crochet blanket lays on the floor, its frayed ends fully submerged in last night’s Pasta Alfredo. My dead pointe shoes (three months overdue for replacement) are half-haphazardly strewn against the cheap faux-leather ottoman I bought on Amazon with a gift card from last […]

Cleaning Soldiers Bleach, toilet cleaner, sanitiser bottles all lined up like defeated soldiers after a gruesome battle. Minute brown stains from the rusted metal gate still adorn my fingertips.  I really need to get these stains out. (or off?)  The voices whisper. Now they shout.  […]

I went to a speed dating event on Tuesday after work. It was a last minute thing. My best friend Astrid got food poisoning from her lunchtime Chipotle burrito, and the $10 ticket was nonrefundable. In return for bringing her $10 worth of Bruce Cost […]

I keep a row of used wine bottles in a crate in the garage, waiting for Transvaal daisies to start wilting. These sunny flowers don’t fall apart, they wilt with a graceful bow, giving the floor the next stalk—I usually cut them mid bow. Today […]

I couldn’t remember if depression was anger turned inward or anger was depression turned outward. Either way it seems to be an issue of orientation. If we could just get things facing the right way it would solve a lot of problems. Not that any […]

You were there, not conscious but in body, when they draped you, intubated and hooked you to a ventilator. Your bladder, catheterized. Your body turned, from back onto stomach. Bolsters placed under your chest, to accommodate the breathing tube. Face lowered onto a horseshoe-shaped pad. […]

On the record Lydia Ruslanova was singing a war song, the wounded bird of her voice trying to fly, quivering, hurt, temporal, employed not as an instrument of beauty but of grief, so that as we sat in Slava’s study—dusk, cognac, The Fall of the […]

She pours more bourbon into her watered down old fashioned, the glass sweating even on as cold a day as today. The neck of the bottle taps the glass, her hand too tired to raise it any higher. She’ll need to buy another bottle, she […]