What Fills the Spaces
The Floor The orange parquet where you sat with your grandson, tickled his neck, his toddler belly. Where he dumped out the tub of plastic animals. Where he, the gorilla, saved you, the giraffe, from tumbling off a blanket cliff. The floor where your beer stood untouched for a time, …
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An Apology, from a Daughter of Mormon Pioneers
I had never once thought of my period these past six years, its kicks and strains; the crimson prints stamped into my Levi’s—not until I, walking 600 East in Salt Lake City, stumble upon a memorial, rounded with peeling Doric columns, a 1930s marker from the Daughters of Utah Pioneers: …
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Play Pretend
My mother called on a summer day while I was riding my bike. This call happens once a year, sometimes twice. Always on her terms. So I stopped to walk. “Hello?” I lifted my voice to sound chipper and bright. Not angry that I was going into debt to pay …
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The Ruins on Bourbon and Condé
In 1905, my great-grandfather, Ferdinand Bellande, built a two-story colonial-style house in southern Haiti on the corner of Rues Bourbon and Condé in Jacmel’s Bel-Air neighborhood. With its louvered shutters and high ceilings, the architecture was typical of former French colonies in the Caribbean. He and my great-grandmother raised nine …
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Curvilinear
is the word for the way my brain thinks is the opposite of a line is the roundabout way with a scenic view so forgive me if I wander off and lose the task at hand. Now there’s a black butterfly on the late summer hydrangeas that before this spring …
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Now, You Tell Me Something
As a child, I once poured a heap of table salt onto a brown slug, watched it partially dissolve, then used a stick to slough off its damaged skin. Somewhere, I’d heard that slugs don’t like salt. (I want to tell you something about living: Regrets come like mosquitos, nagging …
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From These Same Woods
November evenings, I waited at the window for my father to return from the woods. When I heard his truck rumbling up the hill, long after dark, I held the curtains open. He always backed into our semi-circle driveway, and usually the bed of his truck was empty. But some …
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Jay Shree Krishna, Jesus Christ
Sunlight filters through the stained glass windows amidst the tall columns supporting the ceiling of Iglesia de la Merced—built in 1534 by the Spanish conquerors of Nicaragua—and illuminates the altar of Virgen de Fatima. I find my mother there, standing before a giant sculpture of the crucifixion. The Son on …
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a lake is still a lake
The rice and chicken are still in the fridge. The mold has sprouted butterfly wings. It has mapped out a continent. The dark underbelly is dotted with white eyes. I caress the soft sponginess and make sure I put back the napkin over the last meal my grandfather sent me. …
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talisman and bubble
Between November 1938 and the start of World War II in September 1939, a rescue effort known as the Kindertransport organized the evacuation of 9,354 children from Nazi Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia to safety in Great Britain. They were sent alone, without their parents, and were forbidden from bringing anything …
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