Heat WaveThe summer my oldest daughter is born is a blaze,roaring up from the Sahara to blanket all of Europe.Roads buckle from the boil. Bascule bridges lift and swell,stuck half-risen and unable to fit back in place.The news reports rising hospitalizations, even...
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...
I first met Mansi Dahal in a graduate class dedicated to writing the body. It was a fitting introduction — while our work varies in topic, theme, and form, we share a habit of writing about sensory intimacies, small tactile details that reverberate across the psyche....
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...
i. When I say I am fat standing in your parlor,I stand tall in that parloras you close doors and shut blinds. You, blind, shut, closed, tell me fatness is not meant for lawns, porches, mountaintops, forget a fat lawn, a fat porch, a fat mountainfind your home in the...
At Moon Marble, the glassblower says glass has memory. He says, this is important to know: if you introduce air, or the temperature changes too quickly, and the marble cracks, you’re going to try to fix it. You’re going to think it was a successful repair. You lock...
I love museums. Perhaps because I’m nosy. I was the child who sat quietly with a book in her lap while the other kids went outside to play. I discovered that if I didn’t draw the attention of the grownups, I could mine their conversation for clues about the world. I...