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…

  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…

  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…

  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…

    “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…

  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 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,…

  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…

  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…

  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.…

  One morning in the spring when I was seven years old, I woke up a puffy pink monster. My lips had disappeared into a mass of swollen flesh, my…

  On the high shelves of my father’s salvage store in Provincetown, I sometimes spotted a glimmer of blue among his dusty collections of clam rakes, lanterns, chains, and anchors;…