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On the edge of the bed steam rises from the teacups on the top of the SuperSer. She scratches at her stockings where the heater element points and folds her legs sideways. Somehow I cannot stop staring at her. The changes in the years since we last met ar
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14775
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...a farmer in coastal California drives by a dead Cooper’s hawk, and says to himself, “Well, I’ll come back for the hawk later. I can hang it in the fruit trees to keep other animals away.” The weight of an avocado is too much to bear, and the smooth gre
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. When the shiny black legs of the spider breach, they are followed by a torso the size of an apple.
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14400
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Master’s nerves fray, the cigarette smoke pouring from hairy nostrils, displeasure writ large on his horse-length face.
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I came of age in a hollowed-out log, my carapace grown hard, the shimmer of green scoring my underbelly. At the time I wasn’t unduly worried by the thought I’d become some self-created godhead
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The clouds above the Dublin Mountains are like singed cotton balls and the rose bush branches tremble in the north wind Mam hates so much. The lawn is a frozen square of muck, the white frost crusted on the few blades of grass left standing.
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Early sunrise lacks any heat and the skunks wait under culverts for the steam to rise from the stem. Nothing to do but dig and dig.
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Mam was from the country and had strong views on issues like cats and pasteurization.
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After her death I begin to see and hear her ghost. It’s at night she scares me the most. The mumbled groans from behind her bedroom door. Granny, lying there, rigid, arms by her sides, her watery eyes fixed on the ceiling.
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4163
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he old man shaves with his electric Remington razor the morning the baby dies. The shrill echo of the phone in the hall brings him thundering down the stairs and as he stands there in his string vest and y-fronts he begins to shake. I make it halfway down
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a key dangles from a chain, useless as a stumped limb.
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We marched on torn feet, the calluses such that we had no hope for the future. You toted your cantilevered heart in a suitcase, a cartographer out of his league, bound for the ocean.
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14162
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Sixteen magpies patrolled the patch of grass behind the house, splitting the soil with their shiny beaks and siphoning earthworms from the wet earth. Your blood and bile suctioned into waste receptacles, your sallow skin pitted and bluing as the sun made
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85244
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You are in a car speeding through Dublin towards the West year after year the journey uncoils past the same landmarks Kilmainham Jail strapped to a chair bullet to the brain on by the Rowntree Mackintosh factory where the black and yellow and orange and r
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“It smells like turkey,” she said, rubbing her one good eye.
“No. I think it’s more like mutton,” I reply, tugging the lapels tight.
The steam rose from the corpse in ripples, the matted fur stiff, stuck together in places. Where it came from we had no
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