In the hotel lobby, the gold light and warmth and flower arrangements were all lies, but they reminded us of spring. We imagined happiness. We checked in.

My uncle looks into the bleached eye of his cat and asks "What happened to my ear?" The meerkat’s eye replies: "You had cancer. Remember? They had to cut off your ear to save you."

“Thank God The Yogurt Store Was Open!”. I knew this would cause cynics to seethe about me and my #FirstWorldProblems. While those less with the times or from many years of vanilla ancestry, might become racist themselves, indicating that I was suffering f

Here I am in the city where we walked side by side, you had driven a great distance and lost your way somewhere where exits left the highway from both directions and unpredictably.

i miss you/ at times unbearably/ a dull ache that won’t quit

Sundays after Mass, Sister Edburga gathered the team in the shower room, we stripped naked in a circle, held hands and said a prayer we’d win our game. A boy no one knew walked alongside her with a box full of jockstraps.

It was already dead and was hanging from her ceiling.

The child closed her eyes again. Outside was sparkling, sharp looking, when she blinked he’d be here, like when she went to sleep and found outside had been whitened with snow. She closed her eyes and opened them, then closed them again. When she opened

We were just as bourgeois as Bloomingdale’s, one generation past canned ravioli dinners with cheap white bread.

I look for the boy we met inside the club, the one who claimed he loved playing with matches, setting fire to churches. I spot him smoking a cigarette, standing so cool against the side of the club, like he might be the nephew of some Viking guitarist hun

"Everything except food and sex."

We were old. Wind came in with small threats and played games with drapes. A print of orchids and some other green affair that looked to me like kiwis. Sadie was arranging some items on a desk and I noticed there was a cricket on the window. I was thinking…

a shy girl

My legs hung over the bed as I leaned over the food tray. Under my left arm was Adele, my toy cat. I wondered if the staff told the boy of my ritual of always feeding Adele first before I gave the spoon to myself.

The daughter's trip, a travail, cross country; the painkillers were not the finisher mom needed—and the white sheets of the institution were too thin to provide her any comfort as she dreamt of swimming; a backstroke suspended over a waterless pool.Her father…