Close




Forecast

November 30, 2017
I remember, before the snow started, thinking I wish it would start. The sky darkened shadow on shadow. The cats, as usual, slept through the morning. Then snow so heavy that even my father, who was a kind of Noah—all resolve and solitude, cabinetry and salt—couldn’t have steadied me. I remember— and this was back...

Gaswork

November 30, 2017
The experts blame St. Vitus; the spookpress, space aliens. But in the decade between Haymakertown and Mattoon, you took meals and showers like all the other folk. You also kept the gas rig clean. With a wet washcloth, you worked the nozzle to a sheen—entirely inappropriate for creeping across the night. If you meant to...

Parricide Blues

November 30, 2017
On the tracks of the Frisco Railroad, Mark Gwyn in a borrowed pickup, March of ’74. He’s my father and he’s helping a newlywed couple move across Tulsa when his engine dies and the truck begins to coast. They roll toward the train tracks and the front tires pop the first rail, pop over the...

Better Not Tell You Now

November 30, 2017
Daisy picking daisies, is how it all started. We were sitting outside the cafeteria, early spring and wildflowers sprinting out of the overgrown soccer fields. Goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace and daisies, white with soft-boiled yellow centers. We finished our sandwiches and fidgeted in the grass. Daisy dismantled a flower, playing He Loves Me, He...

The Baby Cage

November 30, 2017
We lived among poor people, and my mother was interested in them. “Two men sleep in that haymow,” she’d say as we took the gravel road to town. “Not gay, just retarded.”  Or, “That’s where the pedophile lives, the one who uses our creek—remember that catfish I fried on Sunday?”  She once drove me to...

Travel Plaza

November 30, 2017
The day not redolent of anything in particular but more generally it folds into itself a little bag inside The day promises only to give us this more What I am doing right now I will do in perpetuity a nation I cannot leave with no such thing as a passport the wrongness of my...

Risk Management Memo: A Star Is Born

November 30, 2017
I was speaking but it was mostly symbols. Toenails the color of activated charcoal. Walls spattered with cola or similar. You had decided to stop imagining a chalk outline of my body on yours. You were seeing the specialist. Even chewing gum was verboten. I had to fashion a velvet smock for every glass item...

Delfonic

November 30, 2017
Trace the line & move until the ocean turns you, or when the northern hills begin to burn, or a squad car herds you back to the neighborhood you clearly belong. Once, rolling down the window, I felt the Santa Anas pulling against my chest, and naturally, I imagined a jailbreak of buffalo in a...

The Stir of Your Avoided Life

November 30, 2017
You didn’t wake in dewy blue bitter panic or prairie june or spangle grass— no field, no shopping- cart encampment of tarpaulin and toddler’s clothes—though wet- eyed, though whelmed in bottled- up a.m. light, your lungs confined like tidal anemone or beds of strawberries tucked in their black plastic sheeting. You can get used to...

Reckless

November 30, 2017
Loewock, in the Northwest Celebes, lay on a narrow shelf along the coast, its mountains soaring almost straight from the sea. The S.S. Jacob pulled out at 10 AM and with it went the last direct communication of what we call a civilized world. A packet of letters to Muckie, another to Mandy. He stood...

Animals

November 30, 2017
It’s nearly lunchtime and the woman on the phone is getting snippy, so I intentionally flub a word. “I know this must be fistering for you.” “I beg your pardon?” she says. “Fistering. Fisterating?” “Do you mean ‘frustrating’?” “Yes—I mean that. I use the wrong word sometimes,” I tell her, just as I’ve been taught...

The Snow Queen

November 30, 2017
The car is a Gremlin, a metallic green gone hazy with age, pitted with road salt. At Simone’s look around its interior, the driver—Jeremy, he introduces himself formally as she settles herself on the passenger seat—explains he’s the third, maybe fourth person to own it. He reaches out with his free hand to punch in...