These arguments, the silences, were all a slow release
a practice run to make the death of us
this love we had, a little easier to finish.
We have come apart, the skin of us slide
to be faceless, naked, the bones of us stand free
Outskirts of a mining town in northern Minnesota
August 1990
A ten-year-old girl named Ursula Dahl chases after a porcupine behind her mother’s trailer, her frizzy red hair sparkling in the late-summer light. The animal escapes through a wild raspberry patch, but the child refuses to give up.
Empty as the space
on the back of my neck
where the phantom of your
hand rests just
outside the confines of
my comfortable reach
To respect the privacy of the person I’m going to tell you about, I’ve given him the alias Dr. Theodore J. Ammon. If I tell his story well, after you’ve read it you will ask yourself whether you have known people whose lives have been affected in a similar way by the experiences of their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents.
The night is a black dress
draped over the arms of a couch, she whispers
stars plucked like cherry blossoms.
A smokey hush fills the room
David Harris stood at the front of a group of about fifty protesters gathered in a church parking lot just east of a strip of I-43 designated as Jeannetta Simpson-Robinson Memorial Highway just north of downtown Milwaukee. He was closely listening to the instructions being given by a young woman wearing a black T-shirt with I Can’t Breathe printed in large, white, block letters across the chest.
Nestled in the Adelaide Hills, Father John’s home is warm and inviting. Outside, the trees are dampened by the winter rains. The sky is dark although it is only midday. John sits in a blue armchair by the heater. Green plants surround us in the living room where we sit.
The hospital department chiefs hold monthly meetings in a conference room. The room has a high ceiling and tall windows. The walls are made of mahogany panels. There are large portraits of previous medical school deans on the wall. All of them are men in dark suits and black bow-ties, each holding either a pen or a book in their hands, looking straight ahead with an air of importance.
The pain, this feeling of inadequacy, is there with you, and although the seed of it was never recognized as a seed belonging to it, as a seed made of it—pain—they planted it still, in your making, ignorance at the center of their factice bliss, this justification—they didn’t know; did their best.
Mariana Huaman had worked with the Flores family since Rosa was an infant and had been the one to witness the first miracle, the one that occurred on June 17, 1586. Now Mariana is approaching Rosa on her deathbed and remembers that distant day as if it had just happened.
“We have no Rick Smith.”
“What do you mean? I was told they brought him here.”
“I’m sorry.” The [triage nurse’s] annoyance was unmistakable. I had no recourse but to wait.
I’d received a call about fifteen minutes ago. My husband was found by the maintenance man outside, face down on the ground.
Derry was my best friend, but that was a long time ago.
Since then, I built my career while Derry played in a band. I saved for retirement and Derry saw the world. And when I bought a house, Derry was still burning through a revolving door of roommates. Derry always used to say, “Sam… you’re the Yin to my Yang.”
My car twists and curves as the city lights disappear behind me and my headlights spool deep into the dark abyss toward my rural home. I feel relieved I don’t have to face Dad tonight. I’m waiting until morning to break the news of Mom’s death to him.
I swam in the Ganges, source of life to a billion bipeds, golden, striped in a horizontal blue crayoned by a dreamy child. My parents, like all teleosts, were indifferent about my birth, abandoning my siblings and me, but I grew in a chorion cradle, nourished by yolk, a pulsing sphere.
If you’re reading this, it’s only because it has passed through the net of editorial scrutiny. Presumably, an editor or editors have sharpened the argument, eliminated irrelevancies, tightened the prose, and reined in my more intemperate claims.
You inhabit me; you narrow to flanks.
Your spineless nerves sear my ventricles.
The creative will will snap your cheekbone—
hush, soil, remains.
Look at the blank between us
squeezing my shoulders.
after all this busying of body, resisting rest
like a toddler hurling her blanket through the night,
after all these efforts manifesting goals, dreading
rejection, willing perfection like a cheerleader
More insatiable than the desire to hoard,
Your fans say death’s a foreign coincidence.
They also say a forgotten coin’s never
Spent, but its odyssey costs us a day.
In 42, you slid like theodicy.
In Get on Up, you put an omen’s plaything
Eleanor Saravak studied the three news story drafts spread across her wooden desktop. Each one of them sported its own headline. Headlines that ought to boast so much bite and venom they may as well leap off the page and send folks six feet under.
Not that Eleanor joined the news biz to do her readers in or feed them dreck made of letters put together.
Laurenda did not like the look of those men, not at all. She had been hanging the washing up on the clothesline behind the cabin when she heard the tortured whinnying of horses driven too hard, and the whoops of men careless about their steeds. She dropped the children’s clothes in a heap upon the grass and hastened into the cabin.
As an emerging artist, the art form I work with is primarily abstract painting and large-scale installations. My artistic process involves using various mediums and techniques to create physical manifestations of internal dialogues and personal judgments.
In my abstract paintings, I use house paint, various tools, and textured canvases. The technique involves creating overconfident brushstrokes that mask my imposter syndrome, with multiple layers of paint partially hidden under the surface. The inner turmoil arising from self-doubt is expressed as geometric shapes woven together with texture.
I woke up to my grandmother whispering to me: “It’s over. She’s passed.” Like a puppet on strings, I got up and forced myself to send the work assignment I had been working on before the frenzy of organizing a funeral began. A calm sky was lazily rising, as if nothing had happened. In the distance, the roosters were alerting the villagers that it was time to wake up. Their crowing, accompanied by the incessant barking of neighbors’ dogs, was the most precise alarm possible.
It wouldn’t take long until the first horse-drawn wagons passed by on their way to the fields. It was Sunday, but a few sinners would be seduced by the iridescent vineyards and the large corn or alfalfa fields.
There’s life on other planets, and we’re fighting again.
Not so much fighting each other, me and Hazel, but rather the hundred little obstacles we confront daily in the world: electric bills, uninsured vehicles, the price of groceries—it’s a love language in itself that we’re each willing to be the other’s proxy for all these petty aggravations.
When the need for this routine is exhausted, from my phone I will play serious, dramatic music like Vivaldi or some Dies Irae thundering, and we will each see how long we can continue arguing. It’s become a playlist of losing first-smirks.
They eye me as I walk towards them. But I must be so worn in appearance that all see I pose no threat, I am no bandit. And that appearance of mine must be very sorry indeed, for I have known bandits, and they are most ragged in face, tattered in clothing, and thin in frame. It helps that I come along an open road and alone. But degradation works in one’s favor at times.
One stands near the road, attempting to press an old rusty hoop onto a dilapidated and splaying barrel. Beside him a young girl, perhaps seven years of age, carrying her baby sister on her hip. When I greet them, a few others come around.