A JOURNAL OF ART + LITERATURE
At Auction Mrs. Breton’s third-grade class dealt in teeth. Mostly incisors, but canines were coveted most. No one took a shine to molars except Milly. She said they were smoothest, like plaque-covered pearls. The teeth were kept in pencil cases, swapped in calculated exchanges, polished with eyeglasses cloths, and used to practice subtraction. Some kids... Continue Reading →
Limits of the Flesh On fine afternoons, where the sun slips just right through the trees, I imagine being smashed beneath some dense, massive object. It’s happened, you know. Not to me yet, but to others: in a warehouse where the lift fork slipped, a dockyard where the pulley gave. I make fourteen dollars an hour saying,... Continue Reading →
Overturned I blame the gallows. I’d wanted to see them ever since I saw that movie and figured it would make a good stop on the drive from Atlanta to Oklahoma City. I was going home for Thanksgiving but also for my Aunt’s funeral—an imperious woman who crocheted tiny pink and blue hats for preemies... Continue Reading →
Collateral Instead of exchanging actual gifts, we wrote poems about trees. The metaphors extended like plastic bags about to drop: his tree was naked and praiseworthy and obviously my body in the cold interior of his car; mine was bending under ice in a cemetery I loved, where he decided he loved to park his... Continue Reading →
Crush Johnny laid flat on the road as we waited for the school bus. I asked, “What’s wrong with him? He’ll get crushed.” My sister said, “Duh, he’s crazy.” Like that, I wanted him, though he was in high school and I was eight, though I hardly knew what wanting meant. Johnny had a sister,... Continue Reading →
To the houseplants during a depressive episode I used to tear open helicopter seeds. I’d bury them in the mulch and wait for growth. They came down by the thousands, tumbling from the three large maple trees. I remember the smell that came with them as they decayed. We’d rake them up. Those that were... Continue Reading →
Texting my dad about the video store closing We used to rent movies in the summer. Walking at night: the air warm, light, cooling from the day. Our street quiet: filled with the humming of the orange streetlights. I don’t remember what we talked about. We’d rent 80s comedies and buy boxes of candy that... Continue Reading →
Birth Smell Before I gave birth, every newborn I smelled was lemon fresh, unknowing seeds cracked open by promise. Glorious lemon, I said, holding a friend’s baby in my arms. Nameless sun. Crisp as wind. * During birth, I lay in the odor of my terror, body emptying itself out, unfurled gut, acid vomit, &... Continue Reading →
Road Trip with Anne Brontë Declivities, she says, and luster of August. Everything becomes scenery when one must paint. A blessed single life is declared, but the narrative is decidedly nonlinear; there is refusing and there is wanting. I think of Wildfell as a truck stop—someplace you can see from a great distance but don’t... Continue Reading →
Art in Asylum The halls are taupe and evergreen, as if someone gutted a pine tree and stretched it on tenterhooks. Every eighteen feet a poster of a landscape hangs, smothered in Plexiglas and set in a frame screwed tight to the wall. When we move to town, my wife says our house looks like... Continue Reading →
NEW SOUTH 