The Doctor’s Office

is windowless. He asks me to undress—You can wear this. He places a large white bird wing in my lap. It’s winter. I’m holding gloves. Then he’s back and I’m lying on the

Another dry day, so I build my wall—cinderblocks delivered to my driveway— and another house for sale sign comes down and the new neighbors, like the old, watch as I build a cinderblock wall around

tracy

what if i opened my mouth and a swarm of bees just, you know. the weather said it might rain, and i was like, 'okay.' this is thinking about tracy. that's like, a city somewhere, in the

I towed my worldly goods to a remote plot with real snakes in the grass, real primroses near pathways, and I wasn’t a tisket-a-tasket girl running errands but an adult with a narrow skill set that had sent me toward serial opportunities, jobs, my career not careering but ascendant as I checked off items on widely circulated how-to lists, but no one could tell me how to succeed at love. 

The Mortadella

Sometimes when my husband and I argue he eats mortadella from the refrigerator.  Other times he does not.

Rubenesque

There is a term for women of my wife’s size, a

My friend’s friend dated Mario Lopez in college

There you go, in the papers again. Your mouth a hawk dive; your fists up and double-siloed. While you play overcast, we tend to the beetle

Big Boogie, Big Boogie, after watching the way you move through the years
I bet you could dance across water and sometimes I hold my breath
when I see you twirling in the post, all 280 of you,

My daughter made pee pee in the potty, and my mother, who watches her on Wednesdays, shared a moment of pride with me before offering to do the pee pee dance, much to our collective delight. I left

Recovery

After draining the toilet I put everything in the toilet. I drank a bottle of cough syrup and went outside. The cat spoke to birds. The birds spoke to bees. The bees spoke to me. They

[Idea for a picture]

A painter is painting a portrait with an observer beside him. Inside the portrait is a naked woman trying to cover herself with her arms. It may be a Portrait of Venus, or

In the summer between Michael Sam’s selection in the NFL Draft and the day he was cut, his jersey ranked as the second most popular of all rookie jerseys, behind only Johnny Manziel of the Cleveland Browns. Almost like there are gay sports fans.

It’s time to stop relying on sunsets to help move us away from tonight and into tomorrow.

The afternoon we chose the new chief of Cyclops Island, we stood in a circle at the top of the isle’s highest peak, heads drooping, as we squinted and sweated in the sun. The chief had positioned

My Mother Reads From Her Dream Journal

I.

We—you, me, and your sisters—are in a room the size of a broom closet and you say to me What do I do with this jellyfish? and I don’t understand

GIRL POWER

i’ve slept with someone who had a girlfriend
somewhere else i’ve slept with someone who
told me they loved their ex-girlfriend immediately
after sleeping together i’ve slept

As David Lee Roth straddled a giant inflatable microphone, Alex Van Halen banged out the staccato drum opening of “Hot For Teacher.” Soon, his brother Edward Lodewijk “Eddie” Van Halen turned his

Watching the musical Annie is something like a rite of passage for redheaded children. I’ve met so many carrot tops in my life who grew up humming the tunes of Charles Strouse and Martin Charnin,

David Shields: Every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art.

In the summer of

But you know, all of us prose writers in the United States have to deal with the shadow he casts and the work he left behind.

Before, the possums’ noise had been an angry hissing, but now their voices were becoming sweet, even musical, the world of them trilling and humming into their endless, private night.