Stories

I miss sex. I really liked it, and I was good at it, if I do say so myself.

Mama would say beware of the little flaws that make one homely.

Amy put her arm around his shoulders. My boy. Isn’t he wonderful?

His eyes always astonish her. Iridescent blue, flecked with black. Her husband was gone, two years later than she should’ve thrown him out.

The guy from the funeral home can’t get the gurney into the house.

A small circle of friends and family babysat so she could go to school.

This morning drifts of sand hissed along the shore like mist.

As I lit the samovar, she stepped through the door with that reserved gaze and whispering voice of hers. The Kabul of my childhood. The Kabul of affectionate gestures, of wise, soft-spoken street vendors. She ended the conversation in her usual discerning way, smoothing the blanket across my chest.

She always came back with her lipstick smeared all over her mouth.

Obama’s voice was deep and melodic; he opened at a deliberate pace.

I had no idea where I’d come from or which way I needed to go.

My headboard reveals an apprenticeship to the family trade.

I will make my own man I will stitch together a coat of drunk minks

We pull up alongside the great body. The fin marks the spot.

We’re fat! So what? They hadn’t yet tired of this chant, the play’s refrain.

We need to stop talking about it, we need to put some pants on.

He squinted and looked off a little beyond where we were.

Bright rot laces the air, light sharpens each leaf. On our way to fallow, fire.

The hands opened calmly like seeds, endured the passage of time.

You need to teach these cows to meditate. To lose their bodies.

I am part dumb, and blind, and deaf, and untasting and unfeeling.

Lori & Garry Marshall

In this plummeting weather there is nothing to do but lean in.

Her city, but no cats. Specks of color, no cloth.

It wants to name the dead—without a name you wander lost in the sky.

It was spring: the field, a botanist’s mirage of wild flowers.

It was the truth of it all—hunger’s chill, the scream beneath the surface.

The Others came in the light of day and splayed Father open.