Category: Uncategorized

  Mom doesn’t speak much lately because trees don’t talk. Be like a tree, she said in the past, only I wanted to be a bird. Mom never paid attention to my needs. She claimed trees are better, they bend but don’t break, trees are strong, grounded, rooted, stable. Mom doesn’t talk much lately, doesn’t…

  For years, I’ve played the penny whistle without sheet music. I hear songs on the radio and try to match their notes. Some of the ones I know best are “Thunderstruck” by AC/DC and every song by Paula Abdul. This year, in the winter, I had nothing to do but 1) play the penny…

  Imagined warmth can sometimes be better than real warmth. The TV glow gave me goosebumps. Placebo or not, it felt warm. But as nice as it was, the static on the screen proved unbearable. My twin sister and I tried our best to put up with the intermittent scrambled signal on our Philips CRT,…

  The cat stared at me in that intense way of cats, which some interpret as deep thought but really means the cat is trying to determine if you’re edible or not. When I learned cats obsessed over killing, and not cuddling, it made me like them better. Still I don’t want one. I didn’t…

  IT’S NEARLY SUMMER break and you’ve grown accustomed to walking in the rain. It rains. You duck inside your favorite dinner bar and order your hot dog with the works, dill spear, Jacob Best. You finish your dinner and are about to leave for class, putting money for your bill and a generous tip…

  We’d actually won the trip in a drawing. There was a raffle at Bradley’s work and he’d put his name in with a ten dollar donation. It was a fundraiser for the Estradas, this family whose house had burned down after their daughter had hung her sweater from the wall heater to dry. First…

  Every other day, my therapist gathers fallen branches from outside her office. She arranges them haphazardly, like a reminder, placing them in a glass vase next to the open tissue box. It’s a small habit I find endearing. Once, I asked why there were never flowers in her arrangements. Their lives were already brief…

  I’m through with memory and everything that was before. each day,   I am more permanently in the speckled   light of the afternoon. the obscurant dust swarms with moths. the ink-black   beetles crawl up the sink drain and settle   on the porcelain to lick rust. liar, liar— how could you believe…

  childish mountain mountain of children meaning,   a river rich vein suburb turning the city inside out light foreshadows   black fur,   from which children decipher before language from what won’t –  even sound becomes   heavy as i learn you    (repetitive  motion)     as i know us, coiled being concentrically living…