Dead twelve years, dusty in a drawer of my heart, like the leaf insects and giant earwigs in the basement of a natural history museum. A tiny figurine, still wearing a tattered terrycloth robe, still holding a glass, although the ice melted long ago. My...
The first time, you didn’t know what to wear, and were broke anyway. What you had was a short, satiny dress, fishnet stockings stolen from CVS on 10th. Shoes didn’t matter, obviously. The other girls had on corsets and bustiers, thongs, naked legs and feet. The venue...
That was a good launching pad, the sandstone circle at the cemetery where we hung off the marble hands of Jesus, his blank eyes aflame with fire. The sun set, washing that northeast Montana sky with vermillion then orange until we were sated and the grumbling in our...
There is comfort in the crumpling. That slow surrender syncing low, where body takes the lead—like a knowing before its known, guttural and raw, a maternal embrace with the deep and wide. It’s where intimacy is created, down here on the cold floor, cheek pressed...
A 1975 ad for Buxton women’s wallets asked, “What better way is there to organize all those things you have to carry?” Buxton’s offerings included the Victorian Super Clutch in “ostrich grain split buffalo calf” with “elegant...
Ever since Sarah was born blue and floppy and her cardiologist father resuscitated her, I have imagined a disaster. After Ben appeared, five years later, limp from my labor pain meds and large from my ice cream intake, a steady humming tension surfaced. I was never...
When my Aunt Ada sits down to write to me, she’ll start with the weather: “Greetings on this cold and rainy Tuesday morning at 10:30 . . .” She might finally conclude the letter with a Friday afternoon postscript. As she nears the end of the fourth or sixth or eighth...
A girl between eleven and fourteen (a gauzy and vibrant age) will enter menses. She will have been (awkwardly) informed by teachers conscripted by the state. The girl will inscribe (in carefully rounded letters) her question about tampon strings that snap. She will...
“What do you like to read?” Sister Marie Claire was old. She wanted nothing to do with the Second Vatican Council, and her habit was black, and it completely covered her hair, and her face below it was creamy white and puffy. She was the Principal at Immaculata...
