Number one had cerulean blue eyes and haloed heat as we danced at Sadie Hawkins in our matching flannel shirts and he wandered night stairs and stars almost as stoned as his mother and strummed “Dust in the Wind”…
Content Warning—suicidal ideation in a child Right after my forty-sixth birthday, I begin writing a novel. It’s about a mother who loses all sense of personal identity while taking care of her very ill son. A mother who…
For Margaret Wise Brown In the great green room once known as The Earth, we stretched out in dry grass and stared up at the sky, arms akimbo behind our heads. Elbows for miles. There was a telephone, once…
I am on the East Side of Columbus, Ohio. One street over from Lev’s Pawn Shop is an abandoned storefront where I met my ex-lover when we were in high school. He cuts hair now in a barbershop on…
Elbow The so-called “funny bone,” the most sensitive bone in the body. A tap here feels excruciating. The hardest point of the body, according to the scary mass email my mother-in-law sends (subject heading: FOR WOMEN!). “If assaulted, attack…
“Breaker one-nine, breaker one-nine. This is Hott Lipps. Anybody out there?” I release the button, light a cigarette, take a drag, then exhale. Today, no E., and almost nothing but static on the CB radio. The space heater tries, but…
just before dawn I. It started in the daytime, my sister says, I remember the light. We were watching TV. Mama and Baba were in their room, asleep. We heard noises that sounded like fireworks. It happened at…
Prince tipped extravagantly. He’d leave $100 bills tucked under the ketchup. He did not condescend, but would wiggle his little fanny all the way out the door. The limos gobbled him up and deposited him at Paisley Park. Lavender…
We arrive in the raspberry fields when it’s dark. It’s dark when we pile out of our secondhand pickup. My father, my mother. My brother and me. It’s dark when we start walking the rutted, sopping dirt road that…
You fluff the white rice for lunch. Aroma of fermented soybean paste stew wafts in the air. Gazing out the open window, you tense. You slap the rice paddle on the counter and rush outside, charging headfirst across the…