Defacing the Monument (excerpt)
1. 2. The word “economic” does not appear in the text of the Department of Homeland Security’s webpage entitled “Obtaining Asylum in the United States” is not uttered into the court record. The word “economic” remains in my mouth at the back of the courtroom where I sit scribbling on a legal pad, dangling like […]
Full Stop
I want to have sex with someone, a person. It could be a man or it could be a woman or it could be a man who was once a woman or a woman who was once a man or someone who is both all the time and every day. The person could be ugly […]
The Invisible Cows
When Juju told me Isabelle was sick, my first thought was, What else is new? My next thought was, Good, at least we can get out of here now. It was Easter Sunday, and that morning we’d had our daughter, Isabelle, baptized at the same church where Juju’s parents had been married forty years earlier. […]
Cooked Water
Something hard pressed to be stopped. Look. A train rolls by the window and the birds at home on the water take off while he’s cooking eggs, cleaning up, speaking softly to himself in the quiet of the dining room, finally eating his eggs with a spoon. There’s one leaf in the yard; not his […]
The Coat
That winter a dog bit my hand. The wound, violent. I was studying cosmology. Everything began with heat and density. I didn’t know how to be happy and didn’t think I could learn it. The dog’s collar had a rabies vaccination tag but the animal didn’t look loved. Billy said lost animals aren’t random, they […]
The Wade
We saw them every day that summer as we walked to the gas station with the payphone on Wilderness Drive: two horses, standing in mud. A black horse with long hair bleached by the sun. A red and white paint horse with marks like a skull around her face. Their pasture was a cattle wade. […]
Two Stories
The Good Parent Really, if you had a child, you would want one like mine. He’s never broken a dish, he smiles beatifically, he treats the most banal object with ludic curiosity. He once turned a Pez dispenser into a disaster relief aircraft, tossing bundles of emergency supplies in the form of hard candy pellets […]
Excellent Nature
I am in a forest clearing, by which I mean I am in a parking lot, awaiting my lover’s return from the RadioShack. The birds are in song and someone sneezes on a loop by the dumpster. I’ve cranked back my passenger seat for a better view of the sky through the windshield. The clouds […]
