Lately, I’ve been thinking about love songs. I’m attracted to them as a form, and moreover, to the idea of what they can teach us, and what we can learn from looking for the love song in a particular story or poem or in the world around us. I think about how difficult a form […]
Johanna wakes to a white-bellied blur, a frantic smudge of a bird looping the motel room. It jerks sideways, something hunting or hunted, bounces off the window and scrabbles at the mirror. Its wings pop so loudly, the sound ricocheting off the pressboard walls, that at first she thinks there are dozens of them. Hundreds. [...]
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Alone in his canoe, a New Guinean man begins to sing, hoping his song will charm fish to his net. Although the sea is dead calm, this is small comfort to him, as its glassy surface is a closed door and reveals nothing of its bounty. It shows only his reflection. The fisherman hopes to [...]
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I originally delivered this essay as a craft talk for undergraduate student writers attending the 2016 James Madison University Creative Writing Conference; it has been lightly edited. As I told those assembled, no thirty-minute talk on this subject could possibly be comprehensive. There are many ways to write weird work that matters—this piece doesn’t even begin to touch on […]
Movement(s) of (Poetic) Identity
A restoration was underway at the Hall of Exhibits. I did not know what this meant when I took the position, only that the Grand Reopening would take place in four weeks and that the restoration was in its final intense stage. New exhibits were being installed, given finishing touches, catalogued. I was to be [...]
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Some girls lived in the Lorena Bobbit House. You could stay for a month or for the winter. Janet offered me the couch. Six of us that season, long ago she'd stopped doing meth and me and my best friend too. She rode Ami's back in the living room. We put on My So-Called Life, nostalgic [...]
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a play
A Choose-Your-Own Adventure Hip Hop Star Story
oh here i am, footless again sitting in a tiny boat in the bathtub touching each of my eight breasts touching the cluster of hood-hidden nerves, the wait hurts, the wanting moutarde dijon spread on the soles of my feet well haven’t you ever wanted to leave a print, a thick mess of gold [...]
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if it were years ago and you could lock your voice so it would never unspool itself sheer & strangely mesmerizing like a spider’s silk & you the hunger at its patient center of course you’d want to of course you’d still become a story even years ago the myth is already written your body’s [...]
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