MOST DAYS I FEEL LIKE PNIN I’d be remiss if i didn’t share that it’s very difficult to leave even more-difficult to not blame yourself for the rest of your life, your nose was bleeding while we were playing the fog rolled in, if clarity is a napkin, thrice I was a...
I believe in the belief of you, numb-kneed women hunched like commas over the cap rail,smelling of dry tears and talcum, fingers basket-woven, or men bent slightly at the middle like folded playing cards, heads hung, the mumblings of their prayerslike the humming of...
And there you were—the sun, salt-haze,survival vaporized in my blood. Fever humid, Juneweekend in June, I was looking for younot knowing I was looking. What should I call you? An anniversary, a terror, my real life, a window? I offered myself up to the pale field of...
Rakija (Again)My grandmother-in-law likes to tell us the same stories after dinner, the yearsclear as the windows of our glasses, filled again with the firewater made from winemaking’s remains: seeds, stems, and skins. Faint grape fumes wafting mirage-like into our...
The art of loveThe wet finger of Our Lady of Rain taps across the seadown the karst-bright tower blocks, past the cars disappearing in fog.Our one-bedroom flat echoeswith Siouxsie and the Banshees and I leaf through Dad’s paperbackromances and the glossy Erotika:...
Infomercial for Soft Things (Alcibiades) Alcibiades—Athenian playboy, politician, and general who switched his allegiances between Athens and Sparta during the Peloponnesian War—embraced wantonness and excessive luxury. He had the planks of his ship taken out to...
Bradley steered his Chevy S-10 through the dark to the back of the Campbell property to drop off the deer. He saw Dewayne back there discussing something into a cordless phone, pacing across the open-aired shed where deer and other game were processed. In a past life...
One I know it’s cliché to start with the face in the mirror, but Cassiopeia, how can we begin any other way? Your high cheekbones, arched eyebrows shading ochre eyes, stately nose, and strong chin. Your hair, sometimes blonde, sometimes chestnut, coiled atop your head...
SubstratumI keep my fingernails short so that when I touch myselfI will never tear through my interiority. Each time I leavethe house I remind my husband to touch the childrenoften to fold them gently into him. Put his hands overtheir hands, notice the security of...