Since the pandemic, no parties, no peopleon the street waiting for the ball to drop,just my husband and a couple of friends. We drive to our cottage near the beachto celebrate new beginningssomeplace new, at least to get awayfrom the sameness that has begun to suffocate:the same four walls, same floor and ceiling,even the Amazon boxes that collect weeklyin the recycling. Here the walls are a...
The husband brings home a vase filled with white daisies because he knows his wife likes surprises, and there have been so few lately. The vase is clear with internal cracks that don’t quite run through the entire side. He had joked with the cashier that he hoped it would hold water, which it does as his wife fills it and places it in the middle of the kitchen island. The vase bereft of...
I rearrange my grandmother in loose-leaf pages, each poem a memory, a sterling trinket in a felt pouch I keep by my side, often touching it throughout the day, the way one checks a phone through a pocket. There is the poem where she teaches me about the many tastes and states of salt, the one where I learn to measure for biscuits using my hands: a palmful of lard, a turn of the wrist for a pour...
A misfire of justice. The worry of something hard and smooth. The tactile test of opal along the fingers. The soft parts of the flower or the hard stature of a man imposed. In the terrarium of the inner city the lid cracked and not enough peanut butter to spread the length of four children. Perhaps a therapy of furniture, two minutes on the couch in between shifts, an entire...
Before this, I was a cloud on good authority. I didn’t have the heart to settle for anything less than full iceberg against low hung sky. She shatters the fence post from fist to eye and back again. The man who operates the chipper ride: No need to keep your hands inside at all times. A prayer for more blind, less vision in the time it takes for an hour to pass. The better part of an...
A friend on Facebook posts: I’m less concerned about the mortality rate, and more concerned about what’s going to happen in a month when all the people who died from this come back to life. He is young and does not know loss, does not know the soft, jelly roll of grief that collects at the chest and makes breathing a thing that requires concentration, as if the fish tank of the world...