FENCE

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The Family Teeth

After our mother died, The Father began to go through his reporting papers and the heaps and hills of family documents kept in a large wooden chest from Mexico, locked with a giant iron lock and key.  The chest, part of the spoils from their years abroad, smelled of candle wax and toasted wood.  He […]

A Natural History of Cruising

* *   An attractive figure rounds the corner. Is he? Yes, very. Your gaze locks in his. The moment dilates. Take in the hooded eyes, the aquiline nose. Zero the body. You feel a flush of arousal, a stirring below. Your pulse grows palpable. The mouth wets but you can’t swallow.   * * […]

from True Confessions (and brief dreams) in a Time of Pandemic

Missionaries (1962) The doorbell would ring, and my mother and I would slink into the living room trying to muffle our giggles until, peeking out the kitchen window, we’d see the backs of their white short-sleeved shirts as they walked toward the street and their next stop. We’d been on their list my whole life, […]

Excerpt from Whorl

The headache is the limit, the circle, the disk. The black horizon. Sometimes it’s a dull, red glow, soft latitudes of pain. Or a field of searing, orange craters. They burst open through the dark. Or, with a gentler hurt: tall, blowing vanes of magnetized color. Sometimes it’s still. Maybe then, it sleeps. When it […]

27 Essays I’m Not Writing about Elizabeth Koch

1 In April everyone involved in, or touched by, independent publishing saw a flare go up: Small Press Distribution launched a GoFundMe. SPD is looking for $100,000 to help cover its losses during the covid-19 crisis. To state the obvious, the crisis has profoundly disrupted bookselling nationwide—even and especially by Amazon.com, which has suspended and/or […]

Sixty-six Dresses I Have Read

“It is not tiring to count dresses.” GERTRUDE STEIN 1 This dress I am wearing in this black-and-white photograph, taken when I was two years old, was a yellow dress made of cotton poplin (a fabric with a slightly unsmooth texture first manufactured in the French town of Avignon and brought to England by the […]

Excerpt from BIOCEREMONIALS

Oonseentia. I go out into the city and find a tulip tree, the tallest tree I can find, the tree called oonseentia by the peoples native to this land, the tree these native peoples use to build their canoes. I intend to build a canoe of my own. I wait for lightning to strike and […]