Card Table A practical gift for moving to the city: good cherry squared around black vinyl, four long legs that fold within itself as a greyhound does, disappearing into a nap. Just big enough for a bridge match if I’d ever had four people willing to kiss knees. Just big enough to let me call a corner of that S-Street studio my breakfast nook, stacked with a week’s worth of newspapers while I ate cereal cross-legged on my futon. Just big enough to pull out every few years and

Cherry Vareniki Katya and I spent the winter Saturday afternoon at the big market that locals called “Tolchok,” “the push.” She was shopping for fabric, inspecting the bolts of material with frowning, finger-and-thumb attention. I didn’t want anything for myself, but I was happy to be there with Katya, and the market, a small city in its own right, was interesting even if you weren’t buying. We parted, agreeing to meet again in town at eight; we’d been invited to her friend K

Career Day Any questions? I ask, ________________after my brief lesson on how to field- ____________dress a hare with one slit from neck to hip. ___________________________I’ve draped the slack body on a wooden drying rack at the front of the classroom and it is dripping onto the towels _________________________________I’ve laid beneath. I brought dark towels, to avoid stains. The children are quiet. __________Oh, come on, I say, There is no such thing as a stupid question, _

My Childhood Dog Jessie Once Ate A Box of 120-Count Crayolas and Shat Speckled Rainbows for a Week I used to think everything had meaning— and it does. —Mary Ruefle And how was I supposed to not look for her leavings like Easter eggs or mud pies with sprinkles in the tall summer grass? My humor back then—fast to ignite, like Vicky Volvo’s backseat upholstery when my mother’s cigarette wind-whipped out her open window and back in through mine. The little burn on my thigh like

Celebration I once let a pig, pink and gleaming, into my bed to sleep. I heard it chuffing in the grass outside and went to fetch it. It was a full moon. Blades of grass stood rigid like snowflake spindles. I offered the pig crisp leeks and a ripe tomato. She looked in my eyes. She sniffed my palms, sucked citrus and skin into her snout. I lived alone when this happened. I never told anyone how her fat-padded back curled into me like a question, or that I woke to her wet snou

In Flame The New Year begins in flame. It is cold in New England, wind bitter with crystals of ice, frigidity leaching into bone until folks become brittle. Eve shifts to day, the dark replaced with weak winter light struggling to find its way through the fog. The world is quiet, coast to coast, sleeping away merriment or misery from the previous night, the previous year. We sleep late because we want to wake to hope instead of the same arduous winter and world. At dawn, a wo

Tourette's Syndrome as Future Metalhead It started like a dare, a friend saying, in order to be heavy, you have to listen to heavier things. I thought heavy must be a measure of intensity, which I thought meant it had something to do with pain, which had something to do with the capacity to resist it. Heavy cannot be moved too easily but I knew I moved all the time, or my body moved all the time. We still find this to be a strange idea. My body and I are never still. My body

Anthropocene Anxiety Disorder I had the same nightmare again. ___The one where all the tattoos slough ___off my body like fresh paint ___after rain & every time, I can’t help but to think of flowback water, noxious with benzene, manganese, sodium, methanol. ___It almost reminds me of fracking, ___how a tattoo needle enters the skin. ___Filthy water plunged beneath the surface, dark rising up. A pattern of decay. An open wound in the dirt. Once, all the water choked inside ___

New Year's on Rockland Avenue The pastor stops his sermon to start the countdown. This year, God can wait ten seconds to finish. We’ve already lined up at 10 PM, somber for the bread and blood, stifling our laughs at the sincerity of it all. I’ve curled my sister’s hair, highlighted her cheekbones, put on our sparkly heels post selfies, even with our brother. Our friends ask where we’re going. When we say church, no one believes us. We’re surrounded by Korean banners declarin

What You’re Thinking Now Is a Chunk of Marble “The readjustment to gravity was not always easy. Jack Lousma, for example, accidentally let a bottle of aftershave lotion smash on the bathroom floor when he momentarily forgot that he could no longer let the bottle hang in midair, as he could in the zero gravity aboard Skylab. Fellow astronaut Owen Garriott lost his balance on his first evening back home when his wife turned off the lights as they were going upstairs to bed. ‘I