Tornado

  Before you know it, the earth takes on an extra layer of skin. The wind is whipping, whistling, and when you look outside, you realize this is how everything communicates: We speak. We destroy. And then it’s over. The world may have a few more years—and...

Tenacity

  It’s this simple: the first relationship is nothing but a series of elephant bones— the dust and chalk that stumbles through the mouth. The body is fragile, indiscriminate, pining for what is lost in a field, or has never been given. You spend your time...

She Wanted To Be An Airplane

  Whether it was old wood or metal, it did not matter: it was the flight that was important, the escape and redemption of a sky over the house where she’d grown up, the shed where she sometimes hid in the middle of the night, watching for raccoons. She found a...

Chastised

  The questions come like glass and ice. She removes her hair and a piece of her skull—this is all that could ever protect me—and the brain beneath is pulsing and pink and white. Later, in his dreams, he tells the other bodies that there was yellow,...

Morning Song

  Lackadaisical cries, and the morning is open. Outside, the world is still dark, but in here—through the neighbor’s walls—I hear the earth turning. She is small, perhaps three, and I can imagine her in the small purple pajamas I saw when the family...