Excerpts
My New Friend
In a photograph, her father’s capis jaunty, his beard wild. A hooded falcon poses on his outstretched handand he is everything you want your father to be. My new friend doesn’t wear makeup.Her feet are tiny, tattooed. She’s broke, but spent a whole summer drivingthe craggy roads of Iceland. She says that in Reykjavík, they …
The way I always pictured ritual sacrifices
I wondered which would give in first,the old man carrying his fern or the ferncarried to the street the way I alwayspictured ritual sacrifices. Knees bent,he hunched above the curb long enoughfor the patience of gods to wear thin,taking in the uncertain abyss backing upthe storm drain and flooding the streetinches thick with muck. It …
Because you forgot me, I am weird in the world
Already I’ve changed—wallflower, paper flower,hidden and pressed. My mouth a thin-slotteddoor, an opening in the brush. Find the spoton my neck where the evil eye can leer unhindered. The forest crowds around meto stare, blank-eyed, free of conscience,those eyes see what I’ve become: a bride’snarrow fingers, my hair a bereft knot looking for solace. I …
Eleven Stories of Water and Stone
Winner of the 2014 Prairie Schooner Summer Creative Nonfiction Essay Contest, selected by judge Judith Ortiz Cofer The aim of water treatment is to produce and maintain water that is hygienically safe, aesthetically attractive and palatable, in an economic manner. Manual of Water Supply and Treatment, Ministry of Urban Development, New Delhi, India 1. Maybe …
The Beast Room
The woman unlocked the door and pushed the child ahead of her into the attic room. She held the candle just above the child’s head. "You will sleep here,'' she said. At first in the dim light the child could see only the bed. It was a large bed, like a heap of gray wool …
Three Poems
HATTIE IN GREENWICH VILLAGE Why not sit quietly with them and trailYour smoke across the air as others do?For smoke is beautiful. Why such to-doWith scratching of your match? Your gestures fail,I say, to make your point. Those bred withinThese narrow stairs and crooked streets don't wearWith such éclat what your youth labelled sin.Your leering …
Cimex Lectularius
Whenever I see an exterminator company's vehicle on the street I think what a boon such a service would have been to the set tlers of the Rosebud Country of South Dakota. Mass exterminations were unknown in those days. They were an individual or a family matter, carried out painstakingly by hand. There were no …
Homecoming
He watched the car turn and dip away through a wide stretch of houses that crowded a smudge of far smoke streaming above a slow-fading curve of tall factory chimneys. To the left the downtown heights towered, remote and faint, over the smoke-pennoned river. The city trembled before him like a creation out of his …
The Right Hand
The boy stood tense, holding the post steady and straight in the post hole his father had dug to fill the broken line in the fence. He was a young boy, twelve or so, with light blond hair, like his father's where it had not turned gray, and with eyes the color of smoke, holding …