I grew up in a town with a population of 900. We knew everyone; they us. I grew up knowing who died, who became a parent, who divorced, whose barn burned and the date we’d all meet to rebuild. I lived on a lonely country road ten miles from my high school whose last stretch […]

  My last patient had screened negative for all COVID symptoms in the waiting room, and his temperature was 97F, like everyones. We could set ourselves on fire and the touchless thermometers would still read 97.2, 96.4. Before entering the exam room, I looked at the stack of PPE, which we counted each morning. I […]

Après le D&C   When I braved the wind for unnamed fruit, the sea and trees for shallow depths, the answer clung to my inner thighs as I turned to building an empire. I was sad to be done and glad to be scraped, and my books remained unopened. The first was on the art […]

Under the mold creep and roach scuttles high in the crown molding corners cobwebs attest to life and living not mine and not my own   The porch keeps its own counsel angrily hiving umbrella wasps and carpenter bees squeeze their fat abdomens into expressing shit in the crack between column and cornice   Though […]

i used to associate iran with death since we only went back for funerals. i thought the tinsel altars around the capital city were for some summertime festival, not memorials for dead young men.   my mom never corrected me. instead, she bought me smarties, which for some reason was what my cousins called m&ms. […]