Querida: if you have to choose, I’m telling you, take the cow and not the crate, though a crate might do, the way it frames emptiness, highest law of the universe, id est, whatever you fuck up vanishes, what you made right or never made at all. Me entiendes, my dove? This means: sugarcane, death […]
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Laura Lauth: For the Boy I Saw
no older than six, who watched me watch him get his beating in the empty parking lot of the Beaufort ABC under a buckshot moon one night in July, so hot and high and open, it’d make you cry if you were that kind, but he didn’t, and I didn’t do anything while the fist […]
Matthew Kelsey: Giant Gets Adopted
The morning I was adopted, I arrived late to school. It was quarter to noon, I was dressed to the nines, I was my own show-and-tell. “What does it mean, you’re abducted?” Daniel asked. “Adopted, not abducted,” I said. “And I’m not really sure.” I had already lived with my adopted parents for years. “Do […]
Matthew Kelsey: Confessions of a Giant
For years I’ve been told to hold myself up, to stand as tall as I am, but the world I’ve come to know rarely seems fitting. I have to take a knee when I piss, duck when I step in the shower. I swear I’ve tried to adjust, but my limbs cross their signals the […]
Hilary Jacqmin: Private Lives
They have retired to lost pines and BurgerTime. When our tan Malibu grinds up the switchback to their mock- Tahitian Village in the Texas hills, the grandparents can barely stand to touch us. But “Little David,” they cry out, until my father blushes. Kindness is cold champagne coupes at 5 and 6 o’clock, then Jeopardy. […]
Heather Hughes: Asterisk
I am not coming into the thickness of trees; I’m not coming for your body. Slaughtered scenery shut out by blackout curtains. Hazard and home were your specialty, not mine. Mine the ghost: six teardrops sprout from my center. I covet a seed-sepulcher, miniature infinity where my wisp-thin rootlets would wrap, kindly, into your dark […]