When I was dead, I returned to my father’s house, an old farmstead in Northwestern Ohio, and I stood alone in the gravel drive, satisfied to see that the house was just as I remembered it—small and gray, rising on a plot of land west of a moonlit apple orchard.
I checked the rest of the house, but everyone was asleep. I had a brief moment of nothingness, of emptiness, and then terror bloomed.
Wisconsin
Can we please
go back to
your uncle’s house
in Wisconsin
that was used in
the movie
Amityville Horror
the house is
definitely haunted
but beautiful
even with the
piles of dead
The curtains opened, the ballerinas emerged, toes became violins, hands, trumpets, backs, cellos.
You make me cry
when you talk about her, and only now do I realize
that you never knew your mother at all,
there simply was no space for her in your crowded pocket
carrying poverty like a
“Maybe your ears are broken,” my husband mused to me one night at dinner.
I was wearing headphones, eyes trained to study my plate, the sight of chewing as triggering as the audible noises.
They liked to brag. Who had the highest dose of anti-psychotic medication? Who had gone the furthest off the rails during a manic episode? And they loved to boast about their suicide attempts. Whose was the most gruesome?
When Tony died, I stopped recycling. The kind of power play that was both meaningful and meaningless.
I don’t write “I have the libido of a sloth” in my online dating profile. I don’t use my real surname now either.
The Class of 1953 Tachikawa Air Base Bride School girls were fertile, well-fed and rested.
The only reason I’ve seen Space Jam: A New Legacy so much recently is because I wanted to avoid talking to my wife.
Life is viciously short.
"Me, all scatter-shotted words I tried out in the air ..."
Spring was months away; I could pretend peril didn’t exist.
“And then after I came out to my wife, she stumbled across People Can Change,” said the man from Fresno.
Don’t they let you? Don’t they ever let you lay down your head?
n the car, on the way to the hospital, I put my head in my lap and my hands over my ears, willing the city to disappear.
