Links to my fiction online:
Uncle Al
(in the Bellingham Review)
Links to my poetry online:
Third Surgery
(Winner of Hunger Mountain’s Ruth Stone Prize)
Infection
(at the New Delta Review)
The Oldest Sister is an Indian Giver
(on the Portland Review Poetry Blog)
Elegy Written in a Municipal Junkyard
(in the Cleveland Review)
A couple pieces in print:
The Old Mill
is where the birds live, the smallest sister tells her mother. “I saw them weaving baskets in the eaves.” The quiet mother slides a thread between her lips, sucks a minute, as if on licorice. She’s working on a slipcover. “That’s impossible,” she says, crossed eyes on the thread she now pulls from her mouth, “they’re gone.” The smallest sister shakes her head, a spring-hinged door swinging as the birds flit in and out and in. On the floorboards, a shadow show unfolds while the quiet mother weaves a needle into her hand, and mends. The shrubs peck quietly at the window. Steel mill, still mill, sill mill, the smallest sister thinks. The birds are there, eating the rust from their wings.
(first published in Versal)
Faye Does Bonnie
It’s not just the gun, held close to your chest,
its long neck in your palm, handle nestled
against the gently stretched ribs of your sweater.
Perhaps it’s also that brassy knob of a sun, hung
just above your head, begging touch. It’s stuck
at one, high enough for a showdown.
This too: the symmetry of you—acute
A in the legs, beret’s slight droop above
the eye, half lid and heavy with kohl pencil.
We know your long vowels, all the aiys and the ahys
that spread themselves out, side-long and wide
inside your mouth. We know the plush of your tongue,
so unlike hers—the dead one, who held her gun
with grit, like a burden, who kept her vowels cut.
Waste not. You’re not her, you in the yellow silk. Faye,
your posture is damn near perfect. That’s most of it.
But who would call you on that? Perhaps it’s enough
to guess that the gun is heavy in your arms, and cold,
your own tiny steel burden, already unloaded.
(first published in The Southeast Review)
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