Sea Change
Soil and leaves filled the empty human spaces, and always the buzzing of insects. Spider silk and dust and feathers and carapaces accumulated to build...
Cornish Pasty
When Don says, “Wow, she’s good,” I muster up a grudging agreement, but I can taste the bitter wilted greens of envy. I’m already lamenting my lack of...
How the Lake Saved Me
I used to be a young girl, only 18, who had left the East—where I had neither much sinned nor been much sinned to—but had been often tired, and often...
From the Other End of the Speculum
Dr. Sweeney had summoned Coroner Edmund Rawson to Mrs. Bird’s boarding house because Eliza was in a “dying state.” Dr. Sweeney told him that...
This Town
When we arrived at Boys Town, we all saw what we wanted to see. I noted that the church was old and stone and shaped like a crucifix the way I liked it....
The Velvet Queen in Sternum
Tandem visions of our chests in waves of bone. I find myself aware of the bones in my ribs, the bones in my sternum. When I lose and gain weight, I...
epitaphs #5, #19, #40
here lies a man who lost his virginity during his senior class trip to Grand Bahama Island but thanks to the storms that had gone before them their...
A Bridge and a Bouquet
I wasn’t even sixteen yet, and I could see my mother’s expression of ‘my daughter is getting older’. I didn’t know whether to shift my...