Category: Writing

The beach-shadows capturedin the photo look dead on vacation.In the 20 years since, theseghosts have seen us, too—two children, digging themselves outso as not to be buried alive.

Lost light fixture, hanging smoke alarms ringing— I can’t wake you. The last night: sharing my twin bed, your furnace/your face. When you love me, you rest your head on mine and leave it there, forgetting that it’s heavy. It hurts to feel you, but you call me girl over and over and it makes us…

The south in summer— feet bare trail hopping in a cotton-candy-colored skirt, flowing neatly below the knees. The sun is his periphery and it dips into the water, shine stretching the length, dyeing the top of his nose: the kind of scene that makes you regret Godlessness. I touch it for a moment— touch the…

You like dive bars, and so do I. Walking away, my heels lick the road. No one knows this city like we know this city. From behind, you bent— kissed the hook of my back. Like a tree, carving your name on me. All around me is stale water. I look at my hands, think:…

I finally sat down and connected the lines I was gathering for a found poem based on Craigslist’s m4w Missed Connections section. I mostly wanted to write it for the first line—the first line is just awesome (and, absurdly, I wish it had been posted for me). Also, the OkCupid email on the bottom of…

In the night, the building is still—the pipes dry, the floorboards cold. Everything is tainted a strange gray, only sleep is in color. The passing train vibrates her stomach like an eager violin and she knows: Every night we surrender ourselves— she will die tonight and wake up tomorrow reborn. The ghosts of the old…

In Common My father dove through the sky 19 times— once while I watched. No more than four, I only remember his last ten feet and then ground, the parachute like a dress around him. Now, on a drive up to Sacandaga Lake: a diver swimming down toward the trees, lazily falling like a belated…

On the night of the party, looking out from the 8th floor, someone asked, Do you feel you’ve made it? Do you look at all this and know you’ve made it? The inside of me said, No, said, Where? (The inside, like bluish tar, talks fastest, longest.) After, when I hadn’t left the apartment in a week,…

When we walk at night with the ghosts of New York, we float above grates and glass; we have hit our heads on concrete before— we have jumped from buildings, sank. We spent a year wrapped in blankets, emerged drunk, slightly shrunken; we had films for expression, books for quotations, but no banners for our…