When I hear the baby, I think it’s a cat that’s been left outside in the rain, that’s stuck in a tree, that’s weaved its weak body into an open pipe and can’t find its way out. When I hear the baby, I think it’s a tiny jay fallen from a tall branch, its busy bird-mom out running errands. Or maybe it’s a sick squirrel, writhing in pain, like the one I once discovered beneath a bench in Mexico when I was, myself, practically a baby. Not old enough to know any better. I tried to pick it …
in response to the viral r/askreddit thread titled “what’s classy if you’re rich, but trashy if you’re poor?”*
On Saturday, diner day at Cozy's, I’d wear my new mascara and order a face-sized breakfast. I’d whisper, “do we look rich?” Grandma wore furs. She said things like “primo” and “I betcha.” We were fancy together. Fancy. Fancy. Fancy. I’d fancy-chant till I was dizzy. Grandma was how I learned to salt my pancakes. “To wake the syrup,” she said. I began salting my eyelids, too, after I first saw her with the palette. Her tender strokes. We lived with tense necks, seized by a …
Blaze
I am emptying the fireplace ashes so you can make a fire to seduce me. There’s a pile of tossed bills to be burnt because they have information someone might steal. Our signatures. The pile suggests, via nonrelativistic classical mechanics, a closed system: paper made from wood, wood burning paper. No rock. Maybe a pair of scissors is lying around here somewhere. I am filling the bag as fast as possible because seductions are time-sensitive. The height, the weight, the heat, all are factors. …
Meditations on Trash in a Time of Dumpster Fires
Just before seven a.m., I hear the garbage truck. I’ve already taken the black bin to the curb. The old hockey bag spread inside the front entry for the past month didn’t fit, despite the fact I’d been dismembering it for weeks, disposing of it in serial-killer pieces. A strap, a zipper, a flap of soiled canvas. All that’s left is the plastic frame and the wheels. Braless, I pick up the bag, and sprint barefoot down the driveway. The garbage man pulls up. His truck is a side loader. He releases …
Undoing
It’s been quiet in the car for a few minutes. With the windows down, I’m breathing in the newly-minted greenery that’s emerged from hiding overnight. “So there’s one thing I don’t understand,” you pipe up from your booster seat. “If there needs to be a sperm and an egg in the uterus, how does the sperm get into the uterus?” Last week, it was enough for you to know the recipe for a baby is a sperm, an egg and a place for it to grow. The leaves were buds and we’d go off-trail on our forest …
The Land Holds My Memory
Somewhere there are photos, color slides taken in the late 1960’s of me sitting on top of a large rock. Buck teeth, hair held back from my face with a kerchief, and scrawny legs. My parents have just purchased a piece of land. It is a nice lot, seven-eighths of an acre in Truro, Massachusetts, near the tip of Cape Cod. * Every July during my childhood we’d visit this land to pick blueberries. We could pick them near the dunes, but these were our blueberries. The lot began at the top …