Spring 2022

This Country

Our home was an old stockman’s quarters with thin plywood walls and a tin roof full of holes. The house creaked and cracked, expanded...

The heavy land

Many species preceded us Touched down, tasted dirt, Spread greedy roots Like us Reached for the pulsing winds Engendered curious diggers...

Time, here, who, mutation

We’re really in a very small place and those old enough to remember know how hard it was We’re glad it’s over We don’t want returns to...

Blueprint

Andi flies to China with her dead son’s skin cells in a test tube packed at the bottom of a Paratek medical travel cooler bag...

Please Add Comisery

I committed perjury when I was 14 years old. Full-blown, felony-grade perjury. I looked it up once and they call it...

The Standing Boy of Nagasaki

At the edge of the cremation pit the boy waits as if at attention for men in white to loosen the rope that binds his lifeless...

On a Gilded Age Photo and Contact Sheet at Art Palm Beach

Both are Muybridge original copies, part of an album: it’s his naked woman, smoking, and sitting on a chair—

The Red Dupatta

The girl, whose parents were not talking to her, was trying to figure out an easy way to kill herself. Poisoning was the most popular...

Episodic Parallels, More Aunt, Less Moon

Trucks muscle aggressions down Second and I race across, a little late, raising my arms in greeting. She sees my form...

Good Friday

And it does appear to be that— the sun in abundance dashing through and around the high-rises...

Portrait of an Asian Woman

I On the road we met an Asian woman. We looked at her facial mask. II From a distant mirror in the physical therapy room I saw the...

Lima Revisited

I grew up in a pretty straight-laced household on a farm and went to high school in a small town, and though my mom and dad helped me get...

Focus

Cub held the knife vertically, one-handed in front of his chest, as if it were the final act—the prestige—of some magic trick...

Without Half the Money

Morning's mossy orchard totally spidered. We’d get high, watching them drop and weave. Bored by noon, you’d stick-rip a web...

And though the Earth no longer wobbles you are rocked asleep still listening ̶ every footstep has your mother's breath

Cambridge Royalty

There’s a house on Whittier Street that’s not too hot and not too cold. It’s not too rich and not too poor, not too exposed and not too...