April 26, 2022
I want to say I loved my father, but I can’t remember if it’s true.
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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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March 29, 2022
You’re obsessed, as your husband might say, and you realize it’s not about the color, silly, it’s how you feel to be exact about something, anything—a feeling, a place, or this color.
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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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January 25, 2022
She said nothing, placed a hand on his forearm. Already their spirits were shrinking, an unletting of birthday-bright balloons.
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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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January 11, 2022
Without hesitation, he brings the cup to his fleshy lips, tipping it back, gulping audibly, his Adam’s apple moving like a mouse beneath a blanket. That nothing may be lost.
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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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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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December 14, 2021
I wonder how overpowered you must be to separate electrons from atoms and twirl magnetic fields so high above yourself before snapping them back down until you’ve flared up a Hole of Darkness, like it’s the last spacetime-warping boss of an RPG.
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December 07, 2021
As Cindy bent over close to make the transfer, she sniffed as she always did. The hints were there, but no more than they always were, allusions emitted from his pores of another world.
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November 30, 2021
When we dream, the contours of our memories are rarely sharp.
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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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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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November 09, 2021
she stood with a boot on a ladder that stretched up to nowhere, and with a turned head she looked back at us with blank eyes. It looked like she had decided to leave the earth.
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November 02, 2021
Nestled in, camouflaged, their points jauntily faced the sky, and I knew Glen was right: those boots could never be mine.
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October 26, 2021
Act 20 is grounded to this island in ways I am not. My taproot is rotting. Act 20 has a forest. I am jealous of a law.
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October 19, 2021
She lingered a while, then folded down into a silhouette, onto the metallic chair beside you.
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October 12, 2021
I am not my mother’s daughter. I am a poet. I ride a bicycle.
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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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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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September 24, 2021
During storms, we like to imagine we’re in a boat at sea, the only ones left alive. That’s when Joey becomes Joy.
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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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September 14, 2021
Like most things worth fearing, it was invisible, the danger
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August 31, 2021
perhaps it is i, not the garden, who has been asleep
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August 24, 2021
“Why don’t you leave him?” someone asks. Such a young question
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August 17, 2021
“Shut up, Allen,” I say, but Allen’s already standing and holding the black trash bag like a prize. I can smell the garlicky pink sludge starting to thaw inside it.
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August 10, 2021
I don’t think anyone understood Indiana Jones in the first place.
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August 03, 2021
The bones, he knew from a childhood obsession with dinosaurs... would be there forever; or, almost forever—as forever as it mattered.
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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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July 20, 2021
We didn’t play Shark Attack anymore after I face-planted on a marble slide and banged my two front teeth.
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July 20, 2021
He never did like her cooking and his wife berated him every time he asked for pork fluff to go with his rice.
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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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July 06, 2021
"Besides, seventy years seems a sensible lifespan for a wrecking ball," I told the salesman, my face as honest as a dinner plate.
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June 29, 2021
Your blood’s like Bolognese.
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