Tag: memory
-
The Way the Birds Call
It was the early morning after a big snow and the sun had just come out from the clouds. Even still, the ground had kept its heat from earlier, hot spring days. Instead of sticking and freezing, it had turned the road into deep mud. Just another day of that familiar thick clay Ed was…
-
Two Pear Trees
Soon I’ll forget my grandfather’s garden and the way the two pear trees stand. I’ll forget afternoon visits, stuffing his freezer with zip-locked meats. Below us, garlic hangs in a cellar above canned sauce, the caps dated in Sharpie. Soon I’ll forget the way he shows me the first ripe pear, nodding — proud, as…
-
Tiger Caves and Temple Monkeys
Previously published in The Best Asian Short Stories (2021), Kitaab, Singapore. The hills are dipped in pastel shades of gold and indigo. The wind surrounds me in playful whistles, beating my clothes in sudden outbursts and drying off the sweat on my neck. Joint-aches had troubled me a bit when I climbed up this rock,…
-
the peak of my literary career
as a boy i collected similes or things like them sorted roadside trash by first consonant put couplets of poetry on my bike spokes like playing cards no one understood or knew where i was going but i was on the local news once on my bike jumping 15 trash cans for national poetry month
-
Nickel, Unformed
A blue square, a house to live in against a yellow smear of sun how ugly it all seems to me now this safety, the facade of big hands tongues thickly budded with cysts full of lost ambition, a frozen lens of reason, bulky and transparent in their loving if unmerciful gods. No, I will…
-
Shelling
We cruised down the rattling washboard road, as Toni hugged the shaking steering wheel of her dad’s 1950 DeSoto sedan. She swore the faster we went, the less we’d feel the ruts. We parked next to sprawling bearberry shrubs and dragged our hot-soled Pro-Keds through the deep dune sand. She tossed sand high with…
-
Art Class
– for Beryl Thomas Mrs. Thomas stood before the class, colored chalk dust flecked across her navy blue blouse. She snipped the folded paper this angle, that, this curve, and straight, and opened it to a T or a B. We made an alphabet louder than we could speak or write, to frame the…
-
Used car lot shepherd
Before smart devices most lads aspired to astronaut or president. Sister Mary Black an’ Decker prayed that I would grow into a priest. She was a bit strange. I loved her. With her right sleeve rolled and ruler poised, her bicep damselfly tattoo smiled. Neighborhood pals and I pooled our money buying old Mercury. Didn’t…
-
child psychics
The kind of prophecies children give are more about showmanship than the world to come to enlarge my pupils the way another hand shrank and growled under mine I used to think the things I did to people in my grasp were magic but everyone can hit a muscle like this one and…
