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ODE TO THE IMMORTAL JELLYFISH

October 10, 2023
It’s not the living forever or the 90 tentacles that dangle from its body—a soft white bell just .18 inches across. It’sthe transparency, bright red stomach at its core, how,in times of starvation, it transformsfrom medusaback to polyp,all upturned palm& open mouth, how it does not hide its hungersfrom the world.

PILLAR

October 3, 2023
The last time I saw my grandmother alive I was drunk she was nasty. I asked about ancestors “We were Condé Nast,” she said (the narrow stairs of dementia between us) and “you’re always building fences.” The last sin of Lot’s unnamed wife was not looking back but looking at all what god didn’t know...

APOPHATIC

October 3, 2023
Some days I aspire to be the kind of woman who owns only one tier of panties. She would know the correct order in which to eat a breakfast of pineapple, cashews, and green tea, without having to factor-in cavities. She would not bruise herself with a knife and fork. She did not sit silent...

Hollywood, MO

September 26, 2023
Natalie and Kennedy go off to college. They’re roommates now.And Kennedy’s grandfather dies the first week, so they’re back homefor the funeral. He had an antique horse cartand the family decides to take him to the cemetery in it. They hirea driver and horses. He was a veteran, and when the guns go off,the horses...

Caveat

September 26, 2023
Things aren’t going well with my dad. He’s frail and tellingthe home hospice people that he wants to go to a nursing home.He’s mad about the food the neighbor brings over. What even is this?Who would eat this? So the social worker calls me, becausewhen the patient does this long enough, it’s everyone’s shot nerves.We...

Instructions for Performance

September 26, 2023
In the comedy version, I go with “I’m my own second cousin,” adoptedby the daughter of the brother of my paternal grandmother. It’s a kind of music: daughter of the brother of my paternal grandmother. In the sad version, I’m three, my father’s dead, and soon after, hisfather and mother, with my birth mother lostin...

ESSAY ON NEED

September 26, 2023
By the third night of each disappearance I grew desperate.I imagined her running. I imagined her among wild dogs   making offerings: Bic lighter, crabgrass.Howling to seal the trade. Meanwhile I slept   with her army jacket over my head.Meanwhile I looked for her   in the faces of babies. I knew this was the pricefor the daily...

RUNAWAY

September 26, 2023
Four months until eighteen and no one to bean orphan with. In a town named for its heat   I shivered on strangers’ couches, gave eacha different name. Couldn’t sleep until I saw them:  my dead friends sprawled on the coffee tableeating lavender ice cream by the pint.   I spent days charting the insides of my...

Annie’s Plenty

September 26, 2023
We cannot stop mourning the Chinese peonies,their milk white blooms, fringed and doubled like a forest of moons in the twilight,or quit our disgust at the woman who had them scraped and buried for an expanse of new sod,sod her jowly he-dog will splatter with pee and kill patch by patch because she is too...

Drinking Black Balsam After the Thriller

September 26, 2023
We hurt ourselves on the filmabout the motherless daughterand the daughterless mother dubbed in languages we thoughtwe didn’t speak. To get to it,we had to cross a dark park in rain, emptied (by what?)of people, light, and birds.Incrementally here, we’ve grown to understand that men are notthe daggers, nor weather, normiles of dark cobble, slicked...

Dreams of saltwater

August 29, 2023
The Land of Talk album is on repeatand there are redwoods on either side of us.Oregon is whelmed by recollectionsof gorgeous youthful desire. I think:it’s alright to be this carelesshere, where the basalt sea stackspromise centuries of ongoing love.It’s alright to cede into overdraft, to forgetwhatever poverty follows me,whatever chaotic childhood is seededonto the long,...

Birdsong / the pattern that repeats and repeats

August 29, 2023
The root of this dream is my first walkamongst true oxlip, pollen stretching beyond human sight.A forest knows the relationship between art and time––how time’s needles point in all directions, syllables echoingbefore the tree line is formed. Inheritance is the product of doubling,of spring’s return, when the herb’s long corolla mouthslips into every loosely closed...