Lyric Prose |
“This is me signaling you in Applesauce and Canned Fruit” & “So many mixed messages as I push my body through Athletics”
“So many varieties of ruched bra-like items and comfy leopard pants you can lift purple weights in. They brush against my unformed self.”
Poetry |
“I Dream About Buying a Gun”
“I don’t want to hurt anybody, / I don’t want to cause sorrow or pain. / I don’t want to kill my enemies, / but I dream about buying a gun.”
Interview |
“A Conversation with Alta Price on Translation”
“It’s easy to bring one’s own baggage to the work of translation, and I’m convinced one of my key tasks in this profession is setting all possible presumptions aside before I sit down to work every day.”
Poetry |
“After Reading Bashō, I Remember the Rain”
“I found a quail’s nest under sage plants near the house / woven, I think, while we were traveling, / & the yard seemed abandoned. // The hen burst out under a torrent of hose-water / I unknowingly sprayed into the leaves.”
Poetry |
“Reading Nadezhda Mandelstam in Virgin Islands National Park”
“Every trinket and provision and provocation arrives / By ships riding over sunken ships few remember. / The sea turtles surface for air only when it is safe. / Time is boats rocking their length against waves.”
Fiction |
“A Collision”
“A tall short-haired blond woman got out of the Honda who looked familiar, vaguely, and then both were standing in the cold in the alley, and first one said, Are you okay? and then the other said it and Caroline said, My puppy dog’s a bit rattled, and the other was so sorry.”
Poetry |
“Returning” & “Shimmer”
“… we pass what once was America’s tallest / radio tower, flickering red now / to tell the planes there’s something here / sending sound out into the night.”
Poetry |
“January 29”
“He’s stage four, small cell lung. He shrugs. / A guy he knows feeds his flock, / but he doesn’t sit with them. He doesn’t know their names.”
Poetry |
“Messages”
“The porch light shining on my bedroom ceiling / means my son isn’t home yet and the clock / glows an hour I used to rock him in my arms / with the stealth of a woven web.”
Poetry |
“My Stone” & “Falling With the Snow”
“It’s not showy / like turquoise / or rose quartz / and will never / find a home / in a bolo tie / or a belt buckle.”
Fiction |
“Woman, Blue”
“The voices had crushed him once, with their weight and numbers, with the fears and anxieties and regrets and the losses they spoke of. He wouldn’t let that happen again. He wouldn’t go back to the hospital.”
Poetry |
“Field Notes: Worcester County, October”
“What seeds itself without my intervention: goldenrod, wood asters, Deptford pinks revealed when storms blow dead leaves west.”
Poetry |
“The Circular Dog” & “The Fragrance of Thunder”
“French fries evoke high school Fridays, / salt stippled to the hope I’d find myself. / A moth tastes pheromones seven miles / from his maple-dark lover.”
Essay |
“My Last Margarita”
“My years of allowing my drinking to increase, of guzzling margaritas, had changed something fundamental. Like my grandfather, I wasn’t capable of cutting down anymore. I either drank or I didn’t.”
Poetry |
“The Con Artist’s Daughter” & “The First Time He Visited His Dead Wife”
“… if I didn’t get caught again // the arrest would be expunged. / I fell in love with that word, / practiced saying it: x-sponged …”