“You have an awareness of your self; others take notice of it” – a fortune cookie The boundary between the self and others cannot be defined or separated like the beef and broccoli from the Chinese place on the corner. They are both soaked in soy sauce, covered with ubiquitous grains of rice, diffused in [...]
Persephone did not eat a pomegranate, but a lemon colored red with Magic Marker. It left ink the color of blood on my hands. Zeus threw imaginary thunderbolts from atop a rock in the yard next to ours, and Pan played a shoddy wooden flute with clumsy fingers too young to understand the weight of [...]
A woman kneads dough behind glass in the supermarket. Her thumbs sink, fingers bend and arch like the pliés of a tired ballerina, her skin white with flour. She folds the dough, wrapping apricot and jam like lovers’ secrets pressed in an envelope. “Two, please,” I say, and whisk them off in a brown paper [...]
I eat my apples whole now. Stem and seeds and insides, crunching through the core in three big bites, just like you do. I dream that they will sprout in my stomach and reach tendrils through my throat and down to my toes. They will take root in the ground and anchor me here or [...]
These curtains have fermented for years, hiding the rooms in quiet shade from children’s cries and passersby. Dust motes swirl, dislodged from the folds of sheets and broken piano keys. I sift through a pile of photographs on a bedroom dresser. They appeared sometime after the funeral with my grandmother’s clothes shrouding the living room [...]
With stars I walk the streets tonight. My footsteps ring on walls and trees, their branches bent and gnarled like old men’s fingers snatching at distant flickering lights. In dark and silent night I grasp the dippers’ handles, cold and bright and pull Orion close to me, my fingers curled into the loops of his [...]
the white blossoms like ghosts undulate in the dark, obscure the sky with their indeterminate light. this night the cells are moving warm and slow, sticky with sap traveling through tree limbs, skin limbs flung on grass respiring. and we are all sinking sinking into the ground, islands merging seaward with waves below the worms [...]
Duckling trundles through detritus, her tangerine webbed feet digging deep into the dirt with just a hint of claws. Her pale yellow puffball feathers are soiled brown and sticky, rotting moss bones mingled with the veins of leaves. There is a wriggling worm, twisting blind and serpentine clutched in her beak. He’d forgotten about dabbling [...]