We aren’t supposed to go near the pit on burning days, but it’s never hard to figure out. Last week, for example. David Finster wasn’t at the bi-monthly beautification meeting to petition, yet again, for replacing grass with decomposed granite in public spaces, Christina Hotchkiss didn’t show up at the neighborhood potluck after promising to bring the “world’s best salad,” and Melanie Birch started coming out of her house alone in the morning, no longer needing to carpool with her …
“The bottom of the sea is less cruel than you’d think,” she tells me, four drinks deep at The Schooner Hannah (the dive bar, not the boat), leaning in to play with the links of my secondhand crucifix. She’s the great-great-grand daughter of shipwrecked Cape Verdean whalers who didn’t drown, somehow, but instead built, from wet sand, tidewrack, driftwood & clamshell, houses at the sea’s nadir. They fell for subaquatic fiancées & interbred, she tells me, making a life in which …
Everything is the same on the way to school, the beard guy with his cardboard sign, the white-orange cat that’s weeks-long dead getting pressed deeper and deeper into the pavement from our tires, and Bailey’s stupid big-wheeled truck with its tattered flag sticking up out of the bed, the I’m a patriot stickers of guns plastered on his bumper. But your empty desk …
December is mango season, when sayaca tanagers peck holes and holes and holes. They flock to trees with northern exposure and gorge on the earliest ripened fruits, which hang motionless like sunkissed teardrops not quite sad enough to fall. One by one, however, eventually they drop—their fleshy, yellow …
as always, my life has become the blade-tip of a spade held by morning just before the coagulation of light as always, there is no princedom in loneliness, a liminal space, the beginning of a godless season twilight’s spokes spin away the sky & like a martyr the moon is forced to burn over this garden on the edge of town I do as I have done every humid evening and hang pulled weeds on the fence I murder the simple thorns but not before they claw their names across the lines in my …
Last April, we had a winged visitor on our deck. The hummingbird’s trips to the sugar water had become more frequent. Peeking out from behind the patio’s glass doors, my husband and I followed her flight from the feeder. She landed right before our eyes, in an upturned fork of the overhanging bougainvillea. Her cup-shaped nest was made of thin twigs and speckled with bits of pale green. Inside, two eggs like alabaster were shaded by the …