Joe and Audrey reached 57 Oracle Road. A skeletal fist punched through the center of the teardrop-shaped gate, its index finger curling upwards. A jack-o’-lantern filled with orange and black sweets hung from the finger. Above it, a cardboard sign read: Help
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Trying to avoid the snails after the night’s rainstorm, the crack and squelch of sorrow DS Maolalai has been nominated nine times for Best of the Net and five times for the Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been released in two collections, “Love is
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“In the middle of the charnel ground . . . we can finally contemplate groundlessness.” —Pema Chodron I. Our mothers do us a grave injustice, telling us we’re special, that our drawing is the best in our kindergarten class, that we are the
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Ever since the night he learned about his father, the light bulb in the center of the ceiling has been staring down into his room, filling it with a vigilant wakefulness, as if God Himself is squinting through a peek hole at
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they call it a-gora-phobia when you’ve had enoughof the anxiety and panic the world brings when you’d rather lie in bedwith the shades pulled and the lights off than go to the grocery store when you’d rather open a 2011 Tempranilloand watch TV than get a good walk in doesn’t matter the air
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Be it to deserts, water, tumors, guns or lungs that quit working—those gone are gone. I talk to headstones and wonder if I’m crazy; when I talk to people about crazy things I feel sane. Sometimes my tongue seems foreign and won’t
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Momma put a note in the bulletin that we were looking for clothes youth size four for the boy with the split lip who came up out of the French Broad. His skin was green, not golf course green or lawn mower
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Shirley Jackson used to be my best friend but even then I didn’t really like her because she was better than me at everything. She was prettier, for one thing, and even though neither of us wanted a boyfriend she could have
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We’re hanging in deep heatover the husk of old Abilene, a host of buzzard tourists in teal and tungsten anti-grav Wellingtons. The guide-track waxes wisein our sprouted earbuds: Through the last days,their abandoned missile silos filled with slant rain. The locals dove deep in those dark pools, came up
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