Gossedel the Wily
El’s house, like her, sat on the fringes of a polite community. Where the town ended and the fields began, a few houses, including El’s, barely remembered how to belong.
Stories Poems Essays
Concussed
My eyeballs twitch to blink, they dry out before I remember, staring but not seeing,
To
Blink.
Is This The Place?
The taxi drops me off in front of monumental Victorian gates of stone. The guard hands me a tourist map and
directs me to the genealogy office when I tell him I’m looking for family.
Birthplace
It was the hayloft’s aerial devilry— stench of rot in the heat, barn boards strewn with excrement, swallow and bat, littered with too many winged corpses for a child to revive— that compelled her
Whispers
There are whispers. They call like echoes in empty space, So that we may find a semblance of shapes amongst the darkness. Only here, on the precipice of passing, are we forced with the honest truth. Like rivers, we ebb and coil and stretch far beyond the measure of our bodies.
Motherhood in the Plague Year
Sometime between the murder of George Floyd and the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, I started to think about killing myself.
Code of Escape
Ethan sees an empty highway. Prickly green trees squeeze the highway from both sides. He kicks a pebble. Sometimes there’s a chirp from a bird or a buzz of a fly. He glances down the road behind him, hoping for a car. Nothing. Hours of nothing.
A Sunset or a Sunrise?
I knew Max would be proposing when, under a low, gray sky, my mother herded me to get a manicure. I’d never even stepped into a salon, never showed interest in anything remotely feminine growing up. Except for the sake of ring photos, I couldn’t see any other reason why she’d take me now.
In the Brain of the Blind Dog
She walks on four legs, and they are weak. She makes her way towards the steps. She cannot see where they start, where they fall off. She doesn’t need to; she hasn’t for a long time.