Later
The summer our knack for Kick the Can arcs to Spin the Bottle, we rush supper to fling ourselves into orbit with Angela and her sisters. Delight declares itself in the rank Delta night, draws us out after dark to that lit knoll beneath the streetlight, where we vie with the prior whir and winged havoc of beetle, mosquito and moth. We tease and pick the mown grass, damp already with July’s early dewfall. It grabs hold at the ankles, clings to bare feet, shinnies up tanned legs and skirts under the fringe of cut-off blue jeans. We pluck the green stems of Bermuda, lift them slender to our...
Read MoreWhen We Think of Love
What we think, when we think of love: the night out of which young women are plucked; our own nights of solitude; loss, interminable, or its possibility, fuel for the precautions taken; fermentation, yeast loving sugar, dough rising under the floured sheet; the sea loving the shore furiously, wave after percussive wave; whole colonies of plankton loved by gray whales; the trees outside this house love autumn so much they shake with pleasure when it returns; ice loving water until it dissolves completely, like flesh into the earth. What they’ll find centuries hence: the graves, or their...
Read MoreEach Night She is Like a Drowning Nymph
like a woman pulled out of the river and dressed in warm clothes, her lips parted. The twist of words that will keep blood flowing thru her body. She could be a woman close to drowning, reeled in with eels and sea weed, fins, like Rapunzel shimmying to freedom, her own hair, her words a rope to...
Read MoreUnsolicited Advice for Quiet Girls with Kind Eyes
after Jeanann Verlee When the boy on the street with his friends, all wearing matching neon-colored wife beaters, tells you that you dress like an old woman, take it as a compliment. When your crush tells you you’re beautiful, do not disagree. Tell him that his girlfriend is too. When your first boyfriend tells you to do something to prove that you love him, leave him. When he gets angry and grabs you as if you are a bar-code that belongs to him, leave him and run. When you come home searching your body for any purity it has left, if any, do not blame yourself. Hug yourself instead....
Read MoreThe Pearls
An engagement present from my husband’s parents. Shoved in a drawer like small eggs waiting to hatch, forgotten. They seemed like something in a high school photograph. I’d have preferred a large wrought iron pendant, beads that caught the sun. Pearls were for them and I was always only a visitor, tho he said he wished I’d call him Dad. Sam was all I could get out. It was hard to throw my arms around him, to bubble and kiss. And not just because they thought me a hippie, a witch, thought I took their son’s car and stamps and coin collections. Pearls wouldn’t...
Read MoreNext Breath, Best Breath
For starters, don’t call it a cage corralling the breath. Savvy fingertips mutely Braille two-dozen ribs, each commandeering its own space 24–7, salaaming or shifting, then rising. And re-envision those lungs as maps, the self’s inner atlas: one hundred routes funneling into branch lines, cloverleafs, cul de sacs. Or call them dual panniers flanking a breastbone, one plump koi, kissing a mirror, all lips and flared silk. Wild as papyrus, a Psalter. A Rorschach. A centerfold. Newly un-boned as a cat, inhabit that next inhale, feeling how spacious a backbone can be, freeing shoulders to...
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