Index
When the hero of a thousand journeys is born, part of her soul spirals into a plant that her mother has made to take root in the soil. A sunflower, perhaps. Or a sapling that grows rapidly into a tree,...
View ArticleAugury
The old man wants to know which of his daughters loves him the most. Like robes of silk? like crackling fat? like sheets of hammered gold with garnet crusts? Like steel vaults, like a suit of mail,...
View ArticleDear unseen one,
tell me the hour isn’t late, that the all-day, all-night diner still serves what I crave. The sky’s cloudy, marbled, shot through with bits of emerald: the color of expensive granite countertops, or...
View ArticleBindings
When I was a child did you bend back my little toes and my big toes, then wrap them in a linen bandage for years? asks my second daughter, frustrated that there are fewer grown up styles for size 5...
View ArticleSaturday Afternoon at the Y
The dark-haired woman with the death’s head tattoo wreathed by red roses and flames tosses her three-year-old into the kiddy pool, and moments later the child emerges, wildly laughing at the other end...
View ArticleDear Epictetus, this is to you attributed:
Thou art a little soul bearing about a corpse. And even then you were talking to all of us, weren’t you: ghostly presences in a future that we now inhabit, tumbling swiftly from one gate to another....
View ArticleHow have I failed to notice until now
that the earnest-sounding clerk calling all shoppers to gather round his station between the produce and meat sections at the price club, is doing his demo of Ginsu knives by slicing through not a...
View ArticleCusp
A little warmth, and look— the writhing earth, how it opens like a heart to the sun. In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
View ArticleField Note
A lone ricebird perches on the shoulder of the water buffalo. Three of them, four, twenty: flotilla of wings against the sky. How many would it take, before their weight felt like a burden? In...
View ArticleDear shadow,
it is certain you’ll travel to what waits ahead: not the intersection with its lights already changing, not the fringe of rain- spattered fields nor the road unbuckling toward dusk. Even the lone truck...
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