I am alive but not alive. Sister in the kitchen, searching for what we lost. As soon as Mother is home, that will be the end. The lilies on the sill in soft decay. In hushed voices, the fence unlocked. Her words soft, slow, precise. Sister is quiet. I hold her in the light. She […]

When they come for her mother’s body, Aileen is in the kitchen. She does not flinch as she hears the ambulance doors slam, the heavy footfalls on the front porch, the stretcher crashing and scraping against the doorframe. The TV is still on when two EMT’s enter the house. Aileen leads them down the hallway, […]

My relationship to language is an overdetermined, tangled mess: the end result of unequal parts-learning disability, educational deficiency, and self-stylized coping mechanisms. Although I write through it everyday, I’d never considered writing about it until late in the summer of 2007. The novelist Selah Saterstrom sent around an email asking friends to share a brief […]

The academic from Paris and the self-described “gypsy,” who had met at some kind of literary or maybe linguistics conference, ruined the car ride to the restaurant; they ruined the view of the beautiful hills; they ruined the cows and the word—one of my favorite words—suckle; they ruined the sunshine and the new Young Thug […]