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Parents
The Patron Saint Of Airport Sparrows
Now that I make the frequent arrivals / and departures of a child who grew up / and moved away from his parents, / who grow older and sicker and smaller / between visits, I feel too sad to read / while I wait for boarding to start
November 2023The Nail Salon
Some people remember childhood bike rides and ice-cream sundaes; I remember acetone and moon-slivers of nails.
October 2023Elegy With Adding Machine And Milk
One cold November day / after the lambs were sold / and the wheat brought in, / my grandfather settled / himself at his desk / and punched the numbers / into an electromechanical / adding machine, the gears / whirring and cachunking, / a long white ribbon pooling / on the dusty linoleum
October 2023The American Dream
An Indian immigrant, an oil-company man, a bicycle-riding nomad
October 2023
Fire
A chair flies through your window and someone’s screaming for you to come out and you’re fourteen and he’s twenty and there’s nowhere to go and no cops coming and no one to make this any better, and you become a flame that can’t be extinguished.
October 2023
Smoke Memories
My mother and I were alone the night / our house burned down. I was nine that summer, / and the smell of smoke clung to my clothes. / And after the fire a tree in the yard / grew crooked with scoliosis, its back bending / away from the remains of the house.
October 2023Off Camera
When I was a senior in high school, I became obsessed with the home movies Dad kept in his armoire, behind bottles of cologne. Every day I’d reach through a cloud of Brut and vanilla musk, remove a tape from the stack, and watch the footage alone in our basement, captivated by images of the kid I used to be.
September 2023
Television
Sneaking cartoons, escaping into a sitcom, watching the election results
September 2023
The Tunnel
It started with the mouse in the grass by the sidewalk, ants / crawling on its face. Aidan wanted to touch it. I drew him back / and held him. We talked about the gray fur and the tiny ants. He asked / if the mouse was going to go home to his mama and daddy. / No, I told him, the mouse won’t get to go home again.
September 2023Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen
We are thirteen, my cousin Sally and me — girls on our own, on the roam, under the big skies of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. We’re here for the summer, living in a trailer that my aunt Helen has rented as part of a lengthy effort to seduce her law-school professor Phil, who lives next door.
August 2023
