Nonfiction

  Much later, when I was twenty-eight years old, I met up with our childhood friends at a bar in our Connecticut hometown the night before your funeral and they told me that you’d had schizophrenia. I’d driven eleven straight … Read More

  oil on canvas   Mira que si te quise, fué por el pelo, Ahora que estás pelona, ya no te quiero. Look, if I loved you, it was for your hair, Now that you’re bald, I don’t love you … Read More

  mixed media on canvas   [i didn’t know he had a sister is the wrong thought. nonetheless it comes to me. so does the husband, ferried by the double name. a crossroads. pleasant to think there’s room for two … Read More

  The bus is a bull—pausing, lurching, exploding, charging, bucking, buckling. Ride the bus. Ride the bull. Ride the wave. Every seat is taken, even the ones that face each other and make Mami and I dizzy. The floor is … Read More

  Shortly after college, I bought The Visible Woman for fifteen dollars from a little yellow antique store in my hometown. I’ve carried her with me for years. The name alone, The Visible Woman, had intrigued me, but also what’s … Read More

  our daughter isn’t well my mother says to him, as if each part of the phrase wasn’t a separate cutting, because let’s parse this, i haven’t been their daughter for years, but can live with being their child; can … Read More

    “The dead are having a party without us. They’ve left our worries behind . . .” —Kathleen Aguero, from “Send Off”   Kerry was using again the last time I saw him. He was sweating anxious with icicles … Read More

  The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things. … Read More

  The Black River ripples up from the limestone beneath the Ozark Mountains. Standing in its shallows, watching small fry dash and school just beyond the ripples of my steps, I found a rock the size of my palm with … Read More

  Pinning As a child I was terrified of bugs, so I made illustrated catalogs of them. Encounters with real insects meant tears and fits, yet I forced myself to confront them on paper. Drawing as ritual: I would lay … Read More

  Who’s to say what prompted this. Who’s to say if this display of bodily might, this performance of scorned womanhood, is justified, justifying some wrongdoing, some emotion repressed. The skin of his cheek is still red and supple through … Read More

  A few years ago there suddenly appeared a bird’s nest in the hydrangea outside my front door. A little miracle, assembled almost overnight, it had speckled blue eggs within. Though I didn’t witness the eggs hatch, I could sometimes … Read More