There’s not much literary inspiration in caring for my grandmother. There is a lot of sadness—a lot of bittersweet hanging like cobwebs from the ceiling. A lot of soaking up a final moment, and yet still thinking you’ll have many more to come. But after a few months, we are now down to our last …
Even though I won’t ever see them again, I still carry them. Inside and outside On the lining of my heart And the edges of my brain Beneath my fingernails Or hanging from an eyelash. They saturate my writing and my words Sloping from an s, or cradled in a y. Sometimes, they are even …
Continue reading About the body
I spend nights alone, in a hotel room. Sometimes in a cabin in the mountains. The cabin in the mountains, they’ve done up so that it’s covered in deer prints and wolf prints and bear prints and plaid. Enamel crockery. Indoor hanging vines. Big picture window, so I can stand naked and cry before the …
Continue reading The right amount of sadness
Sometimes, I imagine what it must be like to be buried underground. When I miss my cousin terribly, I think about rolling back the grave grass like a carpet. Like a blanket, or a sheet. I could unbury him, and watch the ground unfurl. When I was little, I was captured by the story of …
Continue reading The Graveyard
My cousin told me once that when she was trying to quit smoking, she buried her tobacco. She walked all along down the beach until she found a place within the sand and she buried it. If I remember right, she rolled one last cigarette before she nested the loose shreds of leaves into the …
Do you know how many novels I have authored in my head? I walk around in circles with imaginary words. Sometimes the words are so loud I climb beneath the covers and I scream. Sometimes I eat them. Take a corner of an m and gnaw and gnaw like dogs with bones. Sometimes I light …
Nothing is too ugly for this world. I think, rather, it is us pretending not to see. My father tells me a story, about my grandfather’s funeral, and how an uncle approached him and asked if he had seen the casket yet. I am two, maybe three, on some stranger’s lap probably beside my brother, …
Continue reading Bad Hairdo at a Funeral
Today, I placed my forehead on the keyboard and typed the letter j a hundred times. With my nose. The tip of it. Something soothing in the motion. I never loved the letter j and yet here I am, a stream of jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjs across the page. I was supposed to water my grandmother’s roses today, …
Continue reading A Haunted House and Dying
The Wild Heart of Life 