Like Vines
A response to The Two Fridas, by Frida Kahlo You in white, quite as it should be, Ishroud in gold on blue satin,your hand in mine joined in veinlike vines wound ‘round wounds, your inner workings splayed, secretmirrored chambers’ beat sanguinejourneys free, exposed. I clutchtenderness like a sunset. You triage tears, choke the flowof dreams hemorrhaging,spilling…
Read MoreWednesday and the Whole World
This morning I meet with Deborah, and so I take the number 18 bus and I sit beside a man with a sleepy Huckleberry Hound smile. I know him just as Huckleberry. We never speak, but I know that he knows me and that, to him, I mean ‘Wednesday’. Deborah’s practice is in one of…
Read MoreThree Flash Fictions
Goatboy On Monday we started reading The Crucible and when Mrs. McGarrity asked for volunteers to take on the voices of the moralizing pilgrims, we all sat on our hands. Except for Goatboy, who wanted to read the part of John Proctor. Goatboy was someone the girls called a little guy because every day he…
Read MoreGames of Chance
Forrest Gump was wrong. Life isn’t a box of chocolates; it’s a finite sequence of lotteries, most of them paying small prizes, few of which will irrevocably change your life and every day I play a dozen of them. On weekdays I play my ticket in the driving lottery, steering my car to work along…
Read MoreEach Vagabond by Name: An Excerpt
Excerpted from Each Vagabond by Name, by Margo Orlando Littell (University of New Orleans Press, 2016). 1118 Trillium Street They rang the doorbell once. They’d been watching the house—two stories, red brick—and knew someone was home. They’d seen her drive up and carry in two sacks of groceries half an hour before. She opened the door,…
Read MoreTwo Poems: Dirge; An Egret in Winter
Dirge There is no organ, merely the sound of it in my head.And whoever’s playing never strays from the low notes.Dirige, Domine, Deus meus, in conspectus tuo viam meam.My thoughts forgo translation. There’s no need. The world resembles a funeral home.The curtains are white, not deep purple,but the lack of human footprint is the same…
Read MoreAngie & Betty & Me
My grandmother, Angelina Maria, looks out from faded photographs with the slightest, most mysterious smile, as though she left us with a terrific secret. She was born in Italy, moved to America as a child, lived on a hill covered in lilac bushes, and died on Valentine’s Day in 1974. Just an infant when she…
Read MoreTwo Poems: The Defiance of Girls; October Trespass
The Defiance of Girls After Alice Neel, Isabetta She’s a naked imp, hands on hips,black hair crackling with static, cleft chin tilted.She’s calculating a break out. She may say fuck. or kick the glass out of the French door. I did that once.Tore the dress from its hanger, stamped my new shoesinto fresh tar and would…
Read MoreDinner with Edward
The first time she sees him, Loretta stops in the middle of the street, her hands so tight on the steering wheel that blood drains from her knuckles. Beads of sweat gather underneath her arms, above her lip, and in the crack between her lower lip and chin. When she tries to swallow, she cannot…
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