1. Incipient
The night before B’s twenty-third birthday, at the climax of the St. Louis summer heat, we come home drunk from the bar and fuck on his duvet-l...
First Interlude: Signposts
I search for the right word and feel the shape of it in my head, in my mouth, but the letters elude me. Sometimes you’ve got to l...
Boy plays in a three-piece punk band to quell the fire of a reflection’s tale and stitch the wounds of youth. Girl watches from the sweat-filled Midwestern base...
You’ve made a portcullis of your mouth. Since your daddy left, you’ve turned me into a monster, a shrieking gorgon. I am all of the Disney villains, but especia...
My children are flames. Oxygen they can get any number of ways but the most efficient is if I blow on them. My job is important—at least until they build walls ...
I’m finishing up falafel I picked up after work when I get Valeria’s text. She’s going through it and asks if I’m free to catch up at the diner we both like. It...
In the far tail of the galaxy spiral, on the third planet in the solar system, there is a strange land called Ohio. Once, large predator animals lived there. Fi...
A sprawling area of Berlin’s central cemetery has been cordoned off due to construction, and no matter which way I turn, I find myself moving away from my goal....
I sat on my mother’s couch, posthumously chosen during a sisterly round robin. Sun salved me and honeyed the couch so like her: sturdy on its legs, densely pil...
My kid said the thing in the sky was a divorce. The drunk at the bus-stop revealed it was the Russian hackers. It was thin and, for November, unreasonably shi...
