When Rich was late he would come through the kitchen door, still wearing his tie, matched to the color of his socks, and lie down in the last empty space. One night he pulled a package from his worn briefcase, exhumed a bulbous piece of glass from bubble wrap. It was a small creature in …
She buried him to the neck, a mouth full of dirt, tarred and steam- rolled asphalt around him. Sat down sweating from her work to a dish of pickled sweet breads and chili basil. He sang a muffled song: If you were as lonely as the moon I would gather like the stars around you. …
The sea carves at sand a sculpture engrained with salt and peppered by the pitch of wind. Clouds balloon over water under the mirror sweeps a tango of fish. I swim at the place the plane the point where water touches air at the interstice of oxygen the distance between body and body. When it …
Awakening from a binge of night, she holds her head, raw from sleeping against the rough brick of a school wall, and finds herself, skirt scrunched high, legs hanging over the edge feeling like a stunned fish in the gunwale and stands and straightens before she is put in the back of a white car. …
That it was Earth Day and still the leading edges of an iceberg fell into the sea with a hiss, the center showing pocked ice. And the plane that had flown us home parked, taxied, and flew again. From a distance, the remote camera had an eye in her death room. It was our way …
are like unremarkable people everywhere, only more resigned. You will see them below the icicles on tall buildings, smoking or nipping from a jar of pickled herring as they wait for buses in the rain. They can be distinguished from remarkable people by their patience, their kindness to spiders. They do not list toward cameras, …
As our car exits the country club gates on the round-about street that leads to the children’s tutor, we are forced to a stop. Two whip cracks of gunfire and the street vendors duck under their tables tiled with pirated CDs, baskets upturned, the day’s bread spilled across the sidewalk into the gutter and I …
by Erin Elkins Radcliffe The clean lines of the barn and the house betray no hesitation: in the shed, the awl, the hammer, and the wrenches cling neatly to their place Here is the steady movement of food from root and seed to vein and flower—from dirt to mouth to dirt again Here are the …