Prose, Poetry, and Art since 1956
The tree outside the barbershop was struck down sometime last night, its Siamese boughs wrenched from each other in violent divorce and the weaker flung to the ground— someone, some official someone, has hedged the afflicted area with yellow cautionary tape, as if to fence in the tragedy, or demarcate the location of a corpse— and misting from the open wood is fragrance: xylem and…
When she was a girl she dragged her doll by the hair and scorched her feet on a hot slide. She crawled in the basement with a cottonmouth snake. Even her front tooth dangled from its root. When she was a girl North Georgia and Kentucky couldn’t tether, she was flown across an ocean she’d always know in the following years by its face pressed…
the three of us turn right. Past the iron fence wrapped in raspberry, thick with bee song and morning glory’s violet, the tree’s jaw and its opera throat hitting all the right notes. Past the in-between, the alley with its arched back and vine-covered belly, full of ivy and other tender wrappings. Until, yes— there. The brick house and its moss steps, its spires a…
My mother calls herself our trash heap. She eats what we won’t, grows plump on our leftover eggs, bread crusts, the bitter-hearted lotus seeds we cannot stomach. We have small appetites. Waiting for us is eating, cutting slice after slice of pumpkin bread until all the bowls are clean. No one wants to be garbage, she says, but look what I do for you. In…
A rodman at the far end. A transitman behind. She has them where she wants them, too far apart for brainless prattle, the joking at her expense. She works her way forward, toward the red and white target above the plumb bob. This branch, that twig, she commands her machete like a surgeon. Pausing halfway between here and there, she embraces the close air, the…