HIGH DUDGEON “The Dungeness crab, Cancer magister, is a species that inhabits eelgrass beds and water bottoms on the west coast of North America.” — Wikipedia Catching the crabs when I rendezvoused with an ex-patient that havoc-choked sophomoric freshman year at Stanford Medical School, in retrospect 1981 was […]
Such an isolated place. Where they lived. To give directions to a stranger would be impossible. Off the main arterial road everything round here dissolves into narrow capillaries known only by the name of someone’s house, field, or barn. Their place was set on the edge of a […]
……………PARLAYING The ticking and chimes add nothing to the unhinged details, to the witness disengaged, or to this trimmed lawn, these rakings fictionalized, have nothing to say for the appearances, the sounded densities, the unspecific measures odd lines rhapsodize, inflecting an idiocy the village has no means of […]
The first time I put my legs behind my head during sex it surprised even me. We were young then. The heel of my foot slipped back easy. One and then the other. Ankles overlapped like a Jesus cross.Your dog tags dragged on my chin. I was probably […]
They hadn’t been hiding, and they weren’t hiding now, her parents said—but then, she couldn’t have said what they had been doing, other than hiding half-asleep in the grain shack, waiting for night, when they could finally go out to beg food from the least hostile neighbors. […]
Dogs Welcome, the sign said, in yellow paint on an old piece of tin. Rusty wires at each end fastened it to the bars of the squat iron fence, which enclosed a tiny front yard, less than a dozen feet deep and twenty wide. The gate screeched when […]
A is for alcohol, a strictly forbidden sin. I partook of this sin when twenty years old, at the bachelorette party of a Bible school classmate: Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill, straight from the bottle. B is for Bible, our guidebook to life. The beginning of all rules […]
I know what it’s like to be ugly. I grew up the boy with the long sloping nose, a hill fit for skiers and a mouthful of large donkey teeth. My shriveled hand looked like something preserved in a pickle jar, never able to uncurl itself from being […]
The dragon spoke to me and I understood perfectly. It said it would stay by my side no matter what. And I wanted it this way. I wanted its dark body and golden talons forever by my side. For many years I tried to catch the dragon by […]
Alias INTRODUCTION In the months before I got married, 468 people asked me whether I was keeping my name. Zero asked my fiancé. I decided to hy-phen-ate because I wanted to shut-everyone-up. As a feminist, my decision should have been cut-and-dry. But I grew up in the Deep […]
