In the far corner of the desert, south of the Barry Goldwater Air Force Base, deep in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, eleven miles from the border, they found a Bible, a tube of lip balm, and a set of footprints. This wasn’t what they were looking for.
Read MoreWe settled into ourselves and the talk. I remember
less of what we said than how it felt.
Between us, stilled spoons and glasses, each
with a glint of candlelight, bending slightly,
as we joined in the purr and put of ideas: listen,
and respond, a back and forth in which we joined.
If you have grown up with lack, you will act like Enyinne, who has become an expert in carrying her grief with her so light it doesn’t show to the world. Those years of bread so stale its prices are reduced because it smells like paper and tastes like dust, but that’s all her mother can afford. Those years of wearing slippers for so long they thin out and the heat from the asphalt burns her soles. Those years of washing and wadding up rags to use again, because where does she expect the money for a sanitary pad to fall from? The sky?
Read More—my grandma doesn’t know. My grandma watches
the news. We hear a woof and I woof back—my grandma thinks
I’m dead//talking like a dog//coyote-hungry—I can’t find any money so
I work for it in the night.
On the second weekend of November I bought a small bottle of vodka and coffee liquor to make White Russians. Soup boiled forgotten on the stove as my husband and I poured each other refreshers, spilling cream across the counter. The heater in our house was broken and the girls’ socks hung half off their feet as they cut construction paper at the dining room table. Slivers of paper drifted down to join the dog hair on the floor.
Read MoreIn zombie movies there’s always a couple who fuck
one last time, drink some wine and just give up.
This is the only reason I can think of
to fall in love again. On first dates men often ask
how you would rather die,
I kid you not, drowning or fire.
They want to know my body even as it’s destroyed
by my imagination. The world is burning
and we can’t stop saying the word tender.
We pass a massive plaster cow perched above a party store. We pass an American flag obliterating the landscape, then an ice cream shop. I want to wonder with you what the cow means. But you are not a morning person and I love you.
Read MoreI came to Xinjiang to see someone from before whom I anticipated I wouldn’t find. I’d read in a gawking travel publication that there was a single gay bar in Urumqi where the drag queens dress as Uyghur women in traditional outfits and spin like dervishes to poppy Central Asian music. Maybe he’d be there. But it wasn’t likely.
Read MoreTo be birth marked on arrival to wade through
Sulfurous waves is no easy burden.
Set your eyes to the horizon and inhale.
When the starving sea groans and its monsters leap,
Hold fast to those songs that stem from the ocean’s depths.
Do not waver, sing!
We pretended to know the answers and kept our fingers crossed, sometimes behind our backs. We ignored it when we knew you were up to something. We debated politics. We got pissed when you didn’t fill up the gas tank.
Read MoreAt high tide in April, we caught the sun’s sleeve
after school in our underwear—how the water
chilled our brains into a mushy orchard, numbing
our toes and fingers purple-yellow like Mardi-Gras
confetti. I clutched our mother’s neck but then
so did my brother. That’s why we weren’t allowed
to watch Jaws. You shouldn’t watch it either.
Like the cicadas of North America, the songs of the cicadas in Japan are unique to their species. Yet there is something about the timbre and the intensity of one that reminds me of the other. Back in the midwest, I sit in my living room and listen to the cicadas and, for a moment, I feel that I am in Japan.
Read MoreThe car is parked in a ditch before the toll booth,
its lights off and the doors locked.
I don’t have a dollar,
and the booth worker has let me
walk to the convenience store in town
to take money from the ATM.
It’s spring already, and the flowers
in the night are blooming like a dead woman’s hair.
You settle on Hemingway’s salted foreskin. The relic resembles a strip of tree bark. It’s hard to believe it ever hooded Hemingway. The peddler winks at your shrewdness and even quotes a line from The Old Man and the Sea, something about the difference between destruction and defeat.
Read MoreHis smile is crooked, cracked, but blimming Bostonion perfection. He’s having the benedict with crab cakes, at $32. My fork jabs a bite; spits out the blue lump crab meat. It’s an East Coast thing he says, the seafood and breakfast thing.
Read MoreThe summer I turned sixteen, I slept with my rowing coach. It was the first time I had sex in the way it happens sometimes, as a surprise. We were at his younger brother’s funeral, my first boyfriend, then we were along the canal bank, on his suit jacket, me tightening my muscles around him.
Joe had his reasons, or didn’t. He reminded me enough of Mike, straight angles everywhere, cheekbones, rib bones, hips sharp. I needed to stop the loop in my head of Mike loping to the dock, four blades on his shoulder, and the impossible grace he displayed setting them down.
Read MoreIt dreams
of a thousand bees in the field
where it is not roaming. It dreams
of sweet honey water,
so we do our best. We try
to get the mixture right.
Gerard says: Wait’ll I tell ye. He leans forward in his blue foldaway chair. This used to be a priory. It smells like sweet milk.
Gerard says: God love him. Patrick. He leans forward, his chair sinking into the floor. He says: God love him. Wait’ll ye hear. He turns his hands over, his palms facing up.
I sit between them, my da and his cousin. They have the same names. We all do. My da and his da, cousins and blood, names threaded through families as though hydrogen-bonded, the bases of a helix braided into each finger’s crease.
The air is heavy and it smells like sweet milk. I can feel my shoes sinking into solid ground.
Read Morein this country / we are buried in the places they want us to be / we say our names before looking up to god for the promised america
Read MoreJust after my thirteenth birthday I killed a mailman. It was an accident as much as anything is an accident. There were no weapons and I never planned it and feel bad about it still, but it happened, and I watched it happen, and after it happened it seemed like something I would always be waiting to have happen again.
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