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...

Gray Wolf

  The myth begins with gray fur and yellow-moon eyes. The teeth. First, there are whispered sightings, dismissed into the neighboring water. * Next, the discovery of cattle bones, picked clean, the bodies having disappeared days before. The farmers are not...

Afterlife

  “I’m not committed to life,” she said and her body was ash beneath the moon. She ate a pomegranate down to its last seed, took a breath and confessed. Pumpkin seeds tasted like water now. She often dreamed of swallowing an entire swing so that she might take...