Fiction |
“Something Special,” “My Mother the Realtor,” “The Salesman Grows Sad” & “The Salesman Gets A Suit” from The House of Grana Padano
“‘Beautiful people become beautiful by living in these houses,’ she would say. At home, late in the evening, she’d tell me, ‘The business is drying up.'”
Poetry |
“Holocene”
“I thumbed through a picture book / called Deep Time whose first / blank page it said was outer space / before anything existed / to be the outer of …”
Nonfiction |
“The Most Beautiful Chaos: Lucinde, or the Audacity of Love,” an excerpt from Jena 1800, The Republic of Free Spirits
“That was precisely Schlegel’s strategy, because it revealed something essential about reality — that it, too, was rarely as clear-cut as people thought, and it, too, sometimes started to flicker, to oscillate nervously between the extremes.”
Poetry |
“the place” and “the judge”
“tell me the lights existed. / tell me that you still breathe the smoke of a thousand cigarettes. / tell me that there is a cold droplet dripping down / the necks of all Augusts.”
Poetry |
“Fool Reversed / Let Go”
“perhaps a great emptiness / is what is needed — / space for the crack / or crevice to sound // its vast sudden / triumph …”
Poetry |
“Smokescreen”
“The audience gasped. / It was all they could do. // My last line sang / into silence …”
Poetry |
“When I Say Clean Your Room,” “When I Say Okay Take My Car,” & “When I Say It’s Your Life“
“Not long ago it all / fell to me, holding her / on my lap at Public Health / when our cheap insurance / wouldn’t cover vaccines.”
Essay |
Uncanny Pretending: on Keith Kopka’s Count Four
“He makes us ‘test’ not only ‘the materiality of the phenomena,’ as Freud writes, but also the morality of it … where — especially for a privileged white man — beauty and mastery are not the product of repressed, animated atrocity.”
Poetry |
“Hate Barrel,” “White On White,” “Twilight” & “Correspondences”
“Silk evening, criminals’ accomplice, / Comes padding like a wolf, sky / Clicking shut like a crypt — / Restless we turn into beasts.”
Fiction |
“Creation Myth”
“When we were small, barely out of babyhood ourselves, the nights we slept at Grandmother’s house at the edge of the blue-black woods, she sent us to sleep with the story of how babies came to be born of women.”
Poetry |
“Fourfold Amen” and “Aubade Minus Sunup”
“Onstage, it takes the lead / a lot of words to die. Maybe / I, too, am holding a red scarf / to a false wound.”
Essay |
“Going to the Mall”
“The mall felt like a place where dreams came true. The mall promised new shoes for school each year, a new toy if I was ‘good.’ The mall was a place where I could have ice cream at 2:00 pm …”
Poetry |
from Lointaines
“Storyville or Benin City / it could be that we don’t have to describe / but only to return fear / to the place where we found it …”
Poetry |
“Fire Ants” & “An Exultation of Spirit”
“I wish I could say that a surgeon’s knife / in the small of my back and the successful removal / of some extra bone, the liberation of a cornered nerve, / would be enough to jump start me back into the joy of living …”
Fiction |
“The Last Golden Hour”
“We wasted the day looking after my oldest son who does not want to be looked after. Your unbonded stepson. He wrecked his car on a Kentucky backroad. His girlfriend clawed his face. Cuffed, no charges filed.”