There was a golf cart stolen—one of us stole, the rest caught a ride—and on it we rattled through darkness, giddy with wind on our faces, the ditches off the road to either side shades darker than what was in front of us, pitch-black. The tops of the trees ranged overhead. Everywhere my vision fell […]
I’ll Let You Go
She’d woken with a premonition in the middle of the night. This was about a man she’d once loved. Sometimes a premonition arrives after the event it describes. (In that case, would we call it knowledge?) This man drew a circle around some things and not others. (This is common. Who doesn’t have their own […]
Nothing Personal
There was him and Anxin and me and Anxin was very young. This wasn’t a love triangle because I knew the dangers of wanting to make someone else’s dreams come true. I’d done that once before. We carried equipment—cables and things zippered in nylon. We did heavy lifting and then I sat in that pile, he called it, of water. […]
Excerpt from Exit to Americana
Yes, Mr. Caruso. The fantasy begins the same way. Mr. Caruso doesn’t mean to interrupt, but he has been so concerned about my happiness, he had to pay a visit. Do I feel I made the right choice, choosing the one bedroom with the terrace above the Apple Store, instead of the two bedroom with […]
It Might’ve Happened Earlier
Pure skyline and all the horizons I’ll never forget—and I’m thinking about how washing windows would be a pretty hard job, maybe one of the hardest. Not because of the heights but because the only way to know you’ve done a perfect job is when you can see yourself at least more clearly than when […]
the companion
They called the child the companion. We will raise him as we would have ourselves, they agreed, but they were young, and stayed up late at night preparing the nursery and sharing their worries. What if the companion is ugly? I will grow thin and wrinkled, said the mother. I will not shave, the father […]
from DEEPSTEP COME SHINING
Oncet after a heavy rain he come back at daybreak threw down a few dollars and cents alongside a set of pretty glass eyes into a little dish on the dresser flopped crosswise on the bed and slept I started to write I feel lost here and I’m […]
The point of the leak is to imagine the flood: Hilary Plum in conversation with Caren Beilin
Hilary and I have spoken before. With each new book that appears, I diligently come forward as her friend and colleague, as a fellow writer in the fun as fuck trenches of indie publishing, which feels like ascendant exile, sometimes like a lot of rubble, but to me where anything good could happen. It’s often […]
Our Audubon
You and I both must know that birds are the blessing disseminated. I only knew you eight years ago. But I found you again in the bookstore here. I touched your book like a mirror pureed into pages—it was the you I remember, the you of our brief friendship. I touched the corners and numbers. […]
from FOUR PERSONAL ADDRESSES
1. One square meter of prison.
