Hey, Hercules!
Enough already. We get it: you’re a badass. Your reputation precedes you, your fans need you to flex that steroidal muscle, but if you didn’t, would they love you any less? Are we who we are, or what...
View Article48169
The headlights flashed across the sign for Putnam Township — I hadn’t heard that name in years, or paid it mind when you would call — and as the words vanished from view, I took a turn I hadn’t...
View ArticleThe Carillon
In the humid haze of a summer afternoon after a day’s work and fretting (foreheads frozen creased with constant worries backs aching eyes bleary) we hear the carillon chiming through our neighborhood...
View ArticleThe Creeping
Our Crepe Myrtle creeps in above my sagging porch screen and magenta blossoms spiral, settle beneath little bare feet.As I sit on my porch, my two children fighting over a balloon string, I smile,...
View ArticleCut with the Kitchen Knife: Hoch’s View From a Bilge Pump on a Highrise
Hoch cut out her collage with a sharp tongue. She is a no-face woman with wild, wiry white hair. She means no. Her husband pulls herup from the fringe of a building, screws her onto the port side into...
View ArticleRe-Rooted
What I look most forward to each morning is not a gratitude journal entry or a cup of coffeewith cream, but your crying out in the darkness, your desire to be next to me, and as I slip out of bed to...
View ArticleHourglass
Time is running out. A twenty- something girl in a dorm room slips on a red dress. Another woman lies on her velvet couch while her lover paints her nude. Late tonight, the moon will fall and split...
View ArticleSuicide
He held her name on the edge of the high-rise, between city lights and bone drizzled hum before rolling Isabella into the alleys to hear his own voice echo, as if to say my voice sounding your name is...
View ArticleWhat Mothers Want
I want a little black dress that fits like it used to, spandex clingingto my love handle-less sides, cradling my same sized breasts that still bounce. I want a full night’s sleep, perhaps a nap, a walk...
View ArticleBroken
The clock on the wall: broken. The German cuckoo, it doesn’t anymore. Folded arms, I look at it and remember when it hung in my grandmother’s house in Bremen. As a child, looking up at it, it looked so...
View ArticleKidney for Tom Waits
I thought maybe my left arm, but that’s ridiculous. I love my left arm. I need my left arm—the tattoo of my Chinese zodiac sign, a rooster, and I play guitar and paddle a surfboard. Then Kim said, “How...
View ArticleOn War (1944)
I say alone. I say among the troops—old men and young boys—Klaus, sixteen, from Berlin, loves American Jazz. When this is over, he says, I want to lead a band like Tommy Dorsey. Play in large halls...
View ArticleThey Promised Miracles
Today we surf as we do almost everyday. Spring. And the wetsuits are getting thinner or not at all. Today the water is teal or turquois. Caribbean-like, nonetheless. But on dark water days, I get...
View ArticleJanuary Moon
If in the distance, a shrimp boat. If in the distance, a hum. If the dark be dark. If the night, windless. If thought a woman, not a man. If it holds him close. If beats a red heart, slow. If the tail...
View Article48 Hours: Everything to Lose
Hours before midnight. No dogs. Pitch inside minutes, a pool of blood. A covered face. How long was I there? Dark and grainy as a camera — do you remember? The ultimate American girl, as fast as no...
View ArticleDateline: Deadly Desire
A heat gathered, sweet and terrifying. I couldn’t go. We never stopped landing. He loved minutes and signs. I had a late flight. I had a typical response. My husband was a world, a quiet cul-de-sac. I...
View ArticlePaper Finger Manifesto
two hens would do a string of lights on a tavern wall carousel’s last spin for the day two hens and an orange olympia beaks pecking at the keys percussion of typebars ribbon and the paper finger
View ArticleWith It
If the interior scroll unfurls and plugs itself in to power a bicycle wheel, do we start a gallery in the back of a truck that runs on vegetable oil? A child can’t tell if a toy sings or just imitates...
View ArticleSpirit
Movements slow down with breathing in beat beat beat out beat beat beat a mouse no a wiping rag no a cricket no but something divides this...
View Article“fake city”
though some deem this place “fake city,” we live here in our apartment buildings, walk these streets and squares and even parks on our way to work or to gather around loved ones. this is where an...
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