Salamanders

Salamanders

September 16, 2022

They drowned her. That’s what David Attenborough told me in his kind old man, British, storybook way. They drowned her, and that’s just what happens to females sometimes during mating season.

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Playlist: Hey Jude

Playlist: Hey Jude

September 14, 2022

Which is exactly the message your firstborn delivers in the cool blue gaze that sifts right through you: Not only are you not what you thought yourself to be; you are the very opposite of everything you thought you were. 

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Broken Home

Broken Home

September 12, 2022

Ten years after the divorce, my mother had saved enough to put a down payment on the turn-of-the-century farmhouse. It is a work in progress, but it is ours.

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My Father and I

My Father and I

April 26, 2022

I want to say I loved my father, but I can’t remember if it’s true.      

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The Hours

The Hours

April 12, 2022

The Hour Instructing the Boy / How to Show His Mother Love Without Hurting Her or / Damaging the Tubing that Sustains Her. The Hour of Grading Papers / Without (Really) Reading Them, then the Hour of Justifying / This is Just Fine This Once.

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In the Valley of Dreams

In the Valley of Dreams

February 01, 2022

My affair felt like the smaller transgression, a less-than sign as opposed to an equal to, but that wasn’t the sort of thing you talked about on the side of the road with dust rising like spirits in the heat, fathers rising from the depths of memory. 

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Avalon - Ruminate Magazine

Avalon

January 18, 2022

I know now what it means to be full to bursting with eager limbs, tears, and milk. I know, too, what it means to stretch something open with my own fullness by way of desire.

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Inventory of a Love Addict

Inventory of a Love Addict

January 04, 2022

Now you have a delicate moth clawing its way up your hand. Beneath it, stone fruit, ripe. You think of Persephone. You wonder how much of love ends in transaction, an exchange. 

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Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy - Ruminate Magazine

Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy

December 21, 2021

Baking is precise and often pretty; cooking, more improvisational; I like them both and lose myself that way, which is a life skill and I recommend it.

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Boots

Boots

November 23, 2021

For my own boots, I’d sit on the floor, pull and heave until my boots came off, contorting my legs in ways that tired adults could not, or would not. 

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Waiting - Ruminate Magazine

Waiting

November 16, 2021

I think about my mother in the garden hilling green beans, and I asked her if I could go on birth control, and she didn’t say anything, which meant “yes,” which meant “no,” which meant, “I’m hilling beans right now.

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Life Expectancy

Life Expectancy

October 05, 2021

In 1944, when my father was just a boy, his dog was sent away and my grandfather lied about it. Something about Sparky being “needed for the war” and special farms for training.

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Sitting Quiet

Sitting Quiet

September 24, 2021

That summer, our other brother stopped showering, and I began swallowing watermelon seeds so one would grow inside me 

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Bored Nonfiction Abigail Thomas The Waking

Boredom Interrupted

September 21, 2021

The flies struggle, but I persevere, and after what seems like forever, wings held tight against their bodies, the flies are sliding down the glass on streams of the liquid, like a fatal carnival ride.

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Mamá Makes a Call to México

Mamá Makes a Call to México

July 27, 2021

Again, mamá will parse what she can and pretend the voice soun   ds the same as the voice in her memories across the border

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March

March

July 13, 2021

Watch me move my mouth like I know what it’s asking. Which is always the past, a redoing it.

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The Hill Was Flat

The Hill Was Flat

May 18, 2021

I have never said to my own mother, I wish you lost me in a wild place, but it is true.

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The G-Word

The G-Word

May 04, 2021

At every sleepover birthday party, we take turns lying on the shag rug, spread our fingers under Julie-Diana-Deanna’s head/shoulders/hips/arms/legs/feet, and recite little-girl mumbo jumbo, trying to levitate each other.

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Composite Characters: Alice

Composite Characters: Alice

April 06, 2021

“The first few years of my life were original, then I kept replaying the same scenes with new actors,” I said, trying to explain myself, to make some kind of amends.

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1962: A Ghost Story

1962: A Ghost Story

March 16, 2021

“Honey.” Her voice is still gentle. “A man can’t move into another man’s house.”

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This Could Be Love - Ruminate Magazine

This Could Be Love

February 20, 2021

She drags me to each room, to each shadow: the witch, the devil, her own figure at the space where a closet meets the wall.

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Wait for Me

Wait for Me

January 19, 2021

I might spend five minutes yelling into the phone, "It's me, Mamina! Your Granddaughter!" And I will hear, "Who? Who?" And I'll try and try again to no avail and think she can't hear me anymore, she can't see me anymore.

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Laundry

Laundry

January 05, 2021

 I left after fifteen years. It was decades before I wore white, again.

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My Condolences - Ruminate Magazine

My Condolences

November 17, 2020

The girl, whose name I never learned, didn’t die before the song was over, and we never saw her again.

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Dream Journal - Ruminate Magazine

Dream Journal

October 13, 2020

I’m a little girl with short hair again, but I can no longer slip back into the silent games she used to play.

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Like Angels At Us - Ruminate Magazine

Like Angels At Us

September 29, 2020

Long before the virus, you and I abandoned reality. All of us together.

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News - Ruminate Magazine

News

September 15, 2020

No one talks of these fights later. No one talks of anything when my mother is around, and no one talks of her when she isn’t.

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The Wasted Things - Ruminate Magazine

The Wasted Things

August 20, 2020

When I find the maggot-fetus on the floor of our shower, I feel intensely fearful that our skin is something that is almost all gone, almost all out;

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Horizon - Ruminate Magazine

Horizon

July 28, 2020

The snow is thick, alive and panting, a roaring wall of white in the space between my father and me.

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Given Light and a Mother Who Was Always Dying in Secret - Ruminate Magazine

Given Light and a Mother Who Was Always Dying in Secret

July 17, 2020

Dragonflies can tell the real stars from glint on lake-surface. They fly to lesser suns, their wings open to duty, dipping to mire. 

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The Wind - Ruminate Magazine

The Wind

July 14, 2020

Our parents rode in the enclosed cabin of our classic white Ford truck. They were talking but we couldn’t hear them. They never looked back to see us and we knew there was no room for us up in that sweetly, quiet cab.

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Woman - Ruminate Magazine

Woman

July 08, 2020

Mom turns to sand. She becomes my mother. No edges.

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Konza Prairie Fire, read Cherie Nelson's flash essay Hazy Skies on The Waking

Hazy Skies

July 06, 2020

Where I am living now, the seasons have no pivot... Springs are mercurial, senselessly violent in their cold and snow. I experience winter here like a death, wait endlessly for a green that will outgrow my grief.

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Woman - Ruminate Magazine

Woman

May 21, 2020

I told her she was the perfect mom. This was when she tried to pull the tubes from her arms the gloves from her hands. One of the nurses said, “Oh, she’s a fighter.” 

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Given Light and a Mother Who Was Always Dying in Secret - Ruminate Magazine

Given Light and a Mother Who Was Always Dying in Secret

May 14, 2020

No one remembers her mother right or observes the rites to keep her whole. The woman becomes fragments, patches for quilts, and the daughter loses the needle, what North should have drawn from her hand and pinned where she could always find it.

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