Featured – Page 31 – swamp pink

Landlocked

October 3, 2022

The first sale I made was the amber shirt. I photographed it from every angle in my empty living room, laid out on the hardwood, with the weak sunlight coming through the windows. Then I chose the best pictures and uploaded them to my Dresser. Vintage!!! I wrote in the caption. Bought on France Honeymoon...

Bendiciones

October 3, 2022

This shit was supposed to mean something. It was Abuelita’s new car. It was us inside it, driving to Del Rio so our señora could have this Caddy blessed by her hometown priest. It was Pops at the wheel, blasting the AC with the windows up, pushing his mother and seventeen-year-old daughter to the backseat...

there

September 21, 2022

is a woman, a negotiation of space— the red line of vitals now partitioned. is she tired the intake, for an entire house, her hands, make-shift, wash negotiate the lint of cobwebs. she is kept inside. a house in ruin. an entire house within her chest shingles, banisters, double paned & the smallest of spaces....

In May

In my junior year of high school, an English teacher, with whom I was in love, had a breakdown and left just before the end of the year. Paul Sorbin was a veteran of Korea, and divorced. This last fact counted as something exotic in a small, New Hampshire town in 1957. The hint of...

Near Strangers

Betsy has a feeling she’ll get a call in the night, but it’s still disorienting when it happens. Four in the morning, pitch black. She had a glass of chardonnay last night, too, which has left her foggy-headed. You aren’t supposed to drink when you’re on call, but she had her neighborhood anti-racism meeting on...

A More Complete Truth

I I can see my grandfather most clearly in the hours before his death, though I was hundreds of miles away. He had been dying for a while—it was slow and nonspecific, his heart beating less often and with less force. My obaasan had taken him to the doctor, who confirmed yes, you’re dying. You’ll...

The Death Drive

Last October, I began to rent space in an art studio in Harwood, a neighborhood in Northwest Baltimore just a few blocks from where I live. I am standing in it now, watching clay dry on a plaster slab my partner and I built for recycling clay refuse. Its big west-facing windows overlook a community...

Demonology, or Gratitude

For a while I lived with an older woman. Anyway, that’s what I told people. It would be more accurate to say she stayed with me when she had nowhere else to go. The lease for the tiny house where she came and went as she pleased was in my name, and I was the...

Tiger, Tiger

………….I ran into a famous young poet, the tall one with large blonde hair swept to the side. ………….I asked him what he was working on. He said he was reading and thinking about tigers, naming several books with “tiger” in their titles. ………….He asked if I had any recommendations of good tiger texts. ………….I...

Ghazal for a Fast, Black Girl Gazing from a Locked Window

My parents left my ballooning body in a small town filled with white pro-lifers, a man-made lake, room & board, food labels black and white. I am fed food pantry goulash and Buckeye confections on football days. Taught catch-up credits by volunteers who look like nuns—old and white. There are other lessons too, like God...

This Kind of Hunger

And how else to exit the year …………but with the wet entering every orifice, its cold clear teeth biting …………into my skin softened like a bolus. Your body on the balcony beside …………me, gummed of its meat. Because that’s what the year has done …………to us—sucked us slick as a rib. And what a clearing....

The Owl of Winter

It is in the half light that you awaken …………as at the end of an age, spread your feathers, sift the dusky air with tips of your wings, …………and move into the spaces of silence clarified of the day’s blared garishness …………—aloft, yet scouring the earth’s curvature with such purity of intention known …………only to...