Because my hands turned into water, I asked my mother to hang a bucket on each arm for my hands to rest without spilling. I set the buckets on the kitchen table, a cedar top stained with simplified Chinese characters, back from when I’d keep …
Alex had dug up irises in the driveway at Faulkner’s Rowan Oak with a spoon and had them in a clay pot on his desk. The rocks from Flannery O’Connor’s flower beds were paperweights, and a nice piece of pottery held peacock feathers he’d picked …
It was new ice. Solid at the edges. Thin in the middle. Nicholas slid around the perimeter in his snow boots. Venturing in a little bit and in a little more. It’s fine, he called out. Then hurried back to put his skates on, tightening …
The aura of calm: January’s sun streams in her kitchen window. A nuthatch, poised upside down on the feeder, chisels away at the new brick of cherry suet. There is a stillness in the room. The gray cat stares intently into light’s cool blues and …
A DJ and a female convict were hypnotized by a scorpion that withers, and I can’t get sparks out of my head. It hurts so well when animals don’t let me be misunderstood. A Hamish hawk was unlucky and unlikely when a rocketship from Dixieland …
A warbler is shaped like a photon, a round sort of softness with a straight bit at the end to indicate where motion was. Branch, sky, ground, branch. A warbler can sit still with a nervous energy that looks like flight, it hops without moving …
A young boy kept his neighbor’s foot under his bed. It lay among the dust bunnies, idle, bereft, still wearing its oxblood leather shoe. The boy had not forgotten the foot, but he rarely took it out to look at anymore. The boy had stolen …
The ocean reverberated swells and dips, then made skin to shelter in, like bread dough when it’s rising makes a crust, or like surface-ice that buckles from beneath. The skin thickened to a turtle’s shell run through with fissures, through which ocean frothed and cooled, …
I’m haunted by diabetes. Metformin twice daily. Finger pricks determine glucose levels after testing strips absorb the sticky drops. This disease is god’s punishment for gobbling fudge at Martha’s Vineyard. Sugared butter on the waterfront shriveled my kidneys and tainted my blood. I cringe whenever …
You hand me a glass of wine walk across the floor and stand in front of a mirror and I realize I have never seen your reflection before and thought it might be a good idea to capture this moment learn a bit more about …