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The Bureau of Exchange 

February 17, 2025
Someone figured out a way to live forever, but it was costly, a complex matter of accounting.   You  burned  an  hour off your  life   in  a  cigarette’s minute,  but got  a half-second  rebate for each kilometer paced on smoke break.   Subtracting  speed’s  saved time,   car-reliance  taxed  the average  American  a  decade—The same quantity...

Nobody’s Bureau 

February 17, 2025
after Emily Dickinson The Blame Machine  is on the fritz  again.  Thankfully, nobody’s  to blame.  Sure took a long time tofigure out,  though—nobody’s dying from an abundance of praise.  The funeral’s  planned for  nextFriday. Nobody knows how to feel. Nobody looks death in its hard, white face and jabs it in the eye.Nobody dies all...

It’s the stage of grief where 

February 17, 2025
I become attached to a loaf of bread that (in low light) almost looks like a baby. Welcome, little one! I know my rights,  so I can’t be denied my own miracle  in a land where people idolize  the face of the Virgin on toast.   At the Y with Baby Pumpernickel,  I sign us up for Mommy &...

Praise Economy

February 17, 2025
A lady tells me she loves my black down skirt and I say I love your coat! And I do! Cheyney says this kind  of backatcha, babe! response is too easy, undoes the kindness. Some German told him you should just  take it, say thanks, or you’re screwing it up. I tell him No,  Italians say Grazie VUOI, or No,...

Living for Something Other Than Your Name on My Phone

February 17, 2025
Lucy dying fabric yellow on our stovetop with turmeric root. How in a packed film screening, Icould tell which laugh was Mabel’s. My godmother reviving the swiss cheese vine I killed last May. Sarah reading love poems on the beach in California. My father dedicating an old-growthforest in Ohio. Molly, high in Minnesota, crying for...

First Light

February 17, 2025
After the apocalypse, we drove through the night to the edges of Acadia. Sat in the car as acorns   rained down, as the wind shivered around us.  As the ancient cities of deer and vole, of field mouse  and foxglove sat patient around the car. And when the light came, first as tender blades   then as a full-blown...

The Wounds of the Tongue that Home Could Not Heal 

February 17, 2025
She could not pinpoint exactly when she’d first started seeing It again. Maybe last Tuesday or Wednesday? What she could remember was how It looked, etched in hard water on the silver bathtub faucet. Or maybe that was not the first time she’d seen It again, maybe she’d seen It before, though she could not...

Dark Side of the Moon 

February 17, 2025
We’re in the middle of an overpass crossing a stretch of the Northwestern railroad when they say the Moon has gone off its orbit. The voices on the radio croak through the static, by turn lost and agitated. Danny and Lina are up in front, and I’m in the backseat, wedged between a suitcase and...

Archers

February 17, 2025
Beth was staring at his face. They had been on maybe seven or eight dates. She was pretty—likely too young and pretty for him. She hadn’t touched the cranberry and white chip muffins he had made before she awoke or the nicer coffee he had spent an extra four bucks a bag for at Trader...

Beautiful Day 

February 17, 2025
She was by then over thirty, but she passed for eighteen. Small frame, smooth skin, nervous round eyes. She followed the rhythms of each day and each season, drifted on rivers of people flowing to the Student Union Building at eleven in the morning, to the bus loop in the late afternoon. She walked Main...

Unspeakable

February 10, 2025
On first watch, it’s hard to articulate why Speak No Evil, the 2022 Danish horror film, is so disturbing. When the credits rolled, my wife and I agreed that a rewatch felt impossible. We couldn’t again subject ourselves to the experience, though if pulsing fear, agitation, and anxiety are the goals of horror, it had simply...

The Silverware Thief

February 4, 2025
She did not steal the good silverware.   No, they agreed that he’d keep the six-piece, eight-setting dinnerware set and she’d keep the silverware—which, unlike the plates, cups, and bowls, could be packed into one small flat box. He said he was happy with the arrangement. She was the one who’d chosen both for the wedding...