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Birthverse

August 26, 2025
The day after my husband and I were supposed to have unprotected sex I sat alone by a dam in northern Maine, watching water surge through holes in a stone blockade, trying to imagine a baby ripping through my body. I thought that’s what I wanted—to transmute into a rabid river.   But sitting there, outside...

Sorry for Making You Wait

August 26, 2025
From his position on the balcony, Mr. Sinha had a clear view of the woman riding into Nazrul lane on her thundering motorbike which belched gray smoke. The loud vroom-vroom reverberated through the old brick houses that lined the narrow Lane, waking their nosy balconies and drowsy seven-by-nine-feet front gardens. Mr. Sinha saw his neighbors,...

American Water

August 26, 2025

Your One-Year-Old, Your Two-Year-Old

August 26, 2025
They were driving into the setting sun, so when Sarah tapped the window and said, “Oh my God,” Leif saw only glare.   “What?” he asked, his voice low because Lily was asleep in the back of the minivan. Normally they didn’t let her nap this late, but Leif had decided to gamble on a wakeless...

The Great Escape 

August 26, 2025
Stella is in the middle of telling half-a-dozen people about the time she rode in an elevator with Sandra Day O’Connor when Graham shows up at the college young alumni networking event. Thanks to a mutual friend of theirs, she’s heard Graham is in town, known he is likely to be here tonight. She’s just...

Duplex: Rupture

August 26, 2025
Mother begins a redundant apology, her dystonia-bound tongue fog-laced & sloppy. I lay down my body beside her, two empty rinds registered for second-hand lives. I dream of laying down my body beside her, two empty rinds in second-hand lives. Mother is a ghost-written version of her mother, a haphazard cut and then paste. I...

October

August 26, 2025
It is an easy leap between words. On my dog walk, drying  hydrangeas on every other stoop.   Drying hydrangeas where there  were only hydrangeas yesterday.  When I use these words   aloud, they become dying, derangement.  Dying, derangement. An easy leap  over the stone wall between   a word and the sound it makes. Dying hydrangeas on every other stoop. Death and arrangement.   It is...

Romance in a Capitalist Age

August 26, 2025
I was skinny as a stick,with a lick like a whip,with a tongue like a fist,with a pistol for my wrongs.I remember being surly.Now I am sure. Nowmy fuse is short. NowI am shot through withthe swagger it takes topush ajar the doors ofa saloon, flick pricelessvases from their stands,with the bitternessit takes to tell...

The Scream-Room 

August 26, 2025
There’s a room upstairs I could write in. A desk by the window, a little red chair.  “It’s perfect,” my husband says, “so long as you remember not to shut the door.”  That’s what the owners told us when we moved in. “But why?” I asked, until they showed me.  They shut the door. The...

Just Before Bed

August 26, 2025
You asked me who I was and I was afraid  to say so, as if my name was a fence around me  only recently overgrown. Like my name was up  there fixing a weathervane in a thunderstorm.  Or like it was trying to bury a dead animal at night  with the ground already froze. As if my name was  the exact...

Our Shakespearean Heaven

August 26, 2025
For the amount of time horses spend in introspection  you’d think they’d make better art. Not that I haven’t  seen a few uncannily abstract expressionist hoofprints   or some like the letter C printed on top of itself offset  enough to suggest one of them is the other’s shadow—  though in this black ink who’s to...

Keep Talking, Don’t Let These Killers Forget You’re Human

August 26, 2025
Their eyes are white balloons half-full of milk,their hearts are plastic frogs with dead batterieswhere their ribbits were but you have totell them in their ears / rightin their ears / those burning paper funnelsyou have to never let them forget you are human / their leveris a pool noodle taped to a tv remote...