selected excerpts
“Laundry Days”, Fourth Genre, Volume 33; Number 2
Twenty-two pairs of feet in Velcro tennis shoes crisscross applesauce on a rainbow carpet. Twenty-two pairs of hands fidget and poke. The room smells of soap and dry-erase markers and Elmer’s glue. Breathing deeply, I whisper to myself—maybe these children are the beginning, the green shoots that will someday root us all to solid earth.
They were toddlers, this class of 2030, when a lone gunman across the country in Newtown, Connecticut, shook every sense of what we thought we knew. About suburban safety, about the march of time and the measure by which we parents gauge our fears.
“On Monasteries”, Drunken Boat, Issue 19
I notice Pete’s hands first—arms hanging motionless at his sides, wrists flexed horizontally as if, even though he stands nearly six feet tall, this posture can somehow push the cracked sidewalk back into place. His matted beard frays and splinters along his collarbone. A thick film of dirt cakes from knuckle to wrist. His whole body seems to cave inward—tobacco-stained fingernails curl toward his trousers, oil-slicks of hair curl along his shoulders, his spine curls into a lopsided question mark—as if to show, from the outside, how his mind does the same.
“Life in the Big Coulee”, The Fourth River, Issue 11
Someone pushes open the front door. It swings easily, the lock long since rusted. We wave our hands in front of our faces as musty air rises and settles around us. Globs of plaster, tar paper and insulation coat the ground and hang from the ceiling beams like fiberglass stalactites. This-is still-ours, our shoes seem to say as they cht-schloop, cht-schloop on the oil-slick floor.
We are quiet, mostly, this crumbling gas station more sacred than the marble headstones in the cemetery. If one man’s life can be compressed and contained within four walls, then my grandfather remains here. We shuffle past one another, tracing with eyes and hands the many years that lie heavy on wrenches and tire-irons, the decades that scatter across smooth Formica countertops and hang from nails on pegboard walls.