Bigfoot lives in my neighborhood. No one believes me but I see him everyday. Mr. B hides in plain sight, his gigantic foot and hairy toes nestled amidst tangled roots, his rugged coat blending with massive pitch pine and cedar. On our daily walks, my Airedale Charlie ignores the rough giant, a truce between wild […]

I went out with a painter once.  He was always on the look-out for a new color he’d never seen before.  It could be a store sign or some spice or fabric at the market—he’d rush back to his apartment and try to mix the color on the spot. He used to wear these thin-soled […]

Elias Morgenthau President, Ellipses Typewriters 10 Foundry Way Dr. Patrick McKay, PhD c/o McKay Transformational Linguistics Institute re: The prototype Dear Dr. McKay, I regret to inform you that we have misapprehended the difficulties in implementing the typewriter for your revolutionary new alphabet. You make a compelling argument that a representation of language drawing on […]

My lover puts up with my body, I take up too much of the bed. Who is your lover she says and my lover she says I’m uncanny today! Let’s arrive more slowly I say, a ghost, swapping ourselves with ourselves, and she says do you really want to be in my body my blood […]

The architect is a master of sharp corners. Some of his corners are as perplexing as malice in fairy tales. Others as treacherous as minor chords first thing in the morning. We’re waiting for him to emerge from the office he has built himself into with his own entangled corners. We fear that he may […]

Ecuador, my old friend. You have not changed. From the plane, I see Quito coming, a great spill of a city filling the valley and creeping up the mountainsides. It has been twenty years since I was here, a girl of thirteen, so scared I was trembling in the terminal. “Lucretia!” My Tia Flor, strong […]

Your baby’s getting ugly, they told me, but don’t worry it’s probably a phase. It’s the unibrow, said Marcy. When he’s older you can get rid of it. They have lasers, wax, tweezers. You can shave it off while he’s little. And he’ll grow into that head, said Jacob. Just hope it’s before he starts […]

My mother promised that someday we’d gather up all the unwanted horses in the world, and we’d build a home for them. Each horse would have a bronze nameplate on their own stall, each horse would have its own name again. “How many unwanted horses can there be?” I asked. Every girl in Ms. Cleveland’s […]

Sitting on the bed’s edge, you know they’re coming. Watching the swinging cradle, the air and wind couldn’t have been clearer. The words are looming, every last word perched just over the bend, ready to insist and shred and tear open swaddling blankets and lips and sheets until only the mattress remains, your baby’s bones […]

K is failing to digest her food properly. The abdominal cramps came on suddenly, flash floods of pain that seized her mid-region, and now she eats a steady diet of rice and vegetables, because everything else is too heavy, and nothing comes out right anyway. She forewarned me once, that things were about to get […]