Grace is a swallow of freeze-your-balls-off cold water
in summer nearly anywhere in the Middle East—therefore,
it’s the sweet feeling you’re alive and present in the world.
The ruined world, certainly. But goofy-hopeful, nonetheless.
Don’t
My father, the state-prison guard, says some of his cells have been opened now, the men he watches going home the same way he does. He says those men won’t report for any sort of work tomorrow. He says the Governor has freed them, not the virus.
1.
I kept a lizard’s skeleton
in a six-inch cedar box
I carried around the house.
I added a blue jay feather
and a pink nub of quartz
and wrote inside the lid—
I won’t tell you what.
Tattered hide clung
to ribs and backbone.
2.
Crouched in
There is a woman in the city here walking around and conducting her day-to-day life with the memory of an argument, a screaming match, that had horrible consequences. Or rather, that ended badly; badly in the extreme. It would be wrong to ascribe the
The day after my husband moves out, I tell my daughters, busy doing homework, I plan to go for a long walk. Instead, I take a short walk, to the beer and sausage place in the Mission. I order my favorite double IPA and read a chapter of a novel. But
At the apple orchard we’re walking, after the mother and daughter farmers at the counter give us our waxy paper bags, and it’s a little too late in the season—too few apples left, and often rotted. There are fewer people here than
I remainder the nut in your doom at the scone where we woke, would you to be a guile to my cluster? My roost, next to yours.
Your mouth, would always apprehend your phoenix so gruffly! She, your motif, had no infection after your dam’s decline,
Vancouver, how they sometimes hate you
Being so wet! You could leave all
Your lower content in dark & cold, with yesterday’s
Newspapers, flyers, flowers, leaves & even
Tales pickled in the pools or puddles full of
I was a pink angora sweater slightly allergic to myself. How
can a color not the color of my skin succeed so well in saying
flesh. I wear myself in his car, slide over on the seat. I was
the table of contents—prelude, footnote—running away
from the
Ebbie drops Clair off for karate at the strip mall dojo on Thursdays at 3:30 and takes an hour for herself across the street in the coffee house where she can sit and stare out at the traffic or at the line inside and legitimately not think about emails
Junaid’s grip on her hand tightens; eyes pop open, and she eases her hair out of its bun, letting it rest at the base of her neck. They are watching: the children have stopped kicking the deflated little ball around and have gathered to stare at
Our home was close to a skating rink
that was attached to an alligator farm.
And Pop did not react when Chris was making tea
in the coffee pot and spilled it down the front of him.
I had dropped a cinder block on my finger
and Gram poured peroxide
Spy (n.): agent, asset, informer, infiltrator, scout, sleeper,
snoop, scout, mole, mule, operative, ghost
Spy (v.): 13th c., from Old French espier “espy,” expiier “to watch secretively”
I was an American girl. I learned good love
is me on the bottom, facing up; good sex
is me on the bottom, facing down. I can overthink
anything, even now, lying sideways between sheets,
inches from you, wearing naked
like
Were he to have the heart surgery nothing would change. The mornings could come and the evenings would come. The children would cry, still. He would live. In the grocery store parking lot he still sat. The berms snow banked. Grim faced
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Back when NASA was forced to auction exoplanet rights in an attempt to raise funds for future missions, my grandpa Melvin, a hulking widower with a mischievous sense of humor, bid $2,500 and ended up as the “owner” of Ross 128b, one of hundreds
She told me that her father had rented dryland on the reservation and in the first year he made more money off of the crop than he ever had before but the next four years the drought came and was bad, each year worse than the one that preceded it,