6.05 / May 2011
On Being a Woman Writer
A very smart man tells me the thing I have written is too much about my self. Too much “I.” Could I please write something else? Differently? He needs something he can publish for the wider literary community that is not so self-centered. Perhaps something about craft. More about literary [...]
Guerilla Drive-In
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It all starts at the drive-in.
He sucks her toes.
The night’s hot and dark. She’s thankful he can’t see her face. They keep the windows rolled up and the radio going. Some Willie Nelson song is on, about a girl with blue eyes. Beads of sweat trail from [...]
Four Acts
A DEATH
It’s midway through the final turn, when she’s just relaxed her hands from underneath her seat, that something cracks in the steering column. Before he would have laughed at the suggestion that he was driving recklessly or going too fast.
“I know this car, babe.â€
The safest place in that country [...]
Six Stories
SHOT-SILK EFFECT, NO. 1
In the morning we wake to sharp sunlight through the lone pine or hemlock outside our motel window. “What is that?†you say. “I don’t know what kind it is, if that’s what you’re asking.†We can’t come to any conclusion. The trees are tall here, ambitious. [...]
Coherence
Two months after the wasp sting, the bruise is hard and small, the size of a button on a men’s dress shirt. A faint ring shadows the bruise, and she touches the center. Its hardness grows into her arm, toward the bone, and she feels the burn under her fingers. [...]
In the Fall
Flying
She knew she didn’t have long before her husband found out about the debt, how deep the roots of it went, so she pushed for a trip, naming the kids in the twins’ third grade class who’d already been overseas. She knew it was then or never, and [...]
Dog Days
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Dad raced his thundercar and made Mom get the races on tape until the summer I turned twelve when Buddy Nightingale slammed Dad into the wall of the third turn at Meridian Speedway. The steering shaft went through his eye socket, pulled out, and took with it [...]
Two Poems
Heroine
Never trust a humble hero,
a meek man recounting with a shrug
his part in overthrowing
a terroristic gunman in the mall
as if his blood hadn’t bloomed
into bouquets of ferocious roses
sprouting from the soles
of his cheeks and he never feared
hell fire. Once his daughter loses
her virginity too soon, or his wife
loses the keys [...]
Math for Dummies
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1. Calculating your way to good health
A bag of ridge-cut, salt & pepper potato chips contains 16 servings. One serving contains 4% of your body’s daily iron needs. If you eat 25 servings (approximately = to 1 & 1/2 bags + 7 medium-sized chips), you will have [...]
Portrait of a Dead Mother
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I thought I saw my mother
laying in the road with those death
chalk lines around her.
Some kids were kicking a ball
around her.
I heard a teenager laugh
around her.
I thought about shouting in his face
but I had to see her face,
look into her eyes
see the reflection of who
did this to [...]
Two Poems
The Shape of a Bedroom
My toes are an outskirts, an idle outpost
where an exile could live out the rest of his days in peace,
thinking about what might have been.
My knees are blue-collar, an over-industrialized city
who’s lost its charm but kept its pride and practicality.
Commuters don’t think twice.
Your thighs are the [...]
Burglary
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Carol decided to burglarize her neighbor’s house. She was a friend of the family, but there were things she wanted that the family had. She was tired of seeing the things, leaving them for the family. She wore a ski mask and used a flashlight. She went [...]
Five Poems
what one eats is destroyed and no
longer real – a grievous error
on earth but in heaven one
consumes & is consumed by god
{muscularly not our}
[...]
Three Stories
Honeymoon
The sky is gathered wool laying too close to their faces, their breath burning the small space between their lips and their disgraceful mouths. Even the lizard hanging on for dear life in the left hand corner of that hallowed room can recognize mistakes when he saw them. [...]
Three Stories
Michael Jackson
Americans skipped a generation. When they came back they were different from before, shinier, more likely to take you by the hand and tell you a bedtime story you didn’t ask to hear, stories without wolves. The rest of the world watched through binoculars as the Americans changed. They [...]
Four Poems
Most of the Things I Have Thought Today
She has so many knots in her hair because we are desperate
in our fucking. Maybe desperate is not the right word.
Think: necessary. Think: éclat. Think the opposite
of mediocre and then continue to think that until you grow bored.
She is always digging, I am [...]
Two Poems
WHAT IT WAS
The waterfall was a waterfall. That’s really all. I want to say it was like a river tipped over, or a slippery tongue blasting outwards from a rock face, or a translucent liquid finale to a dream in which I loved you. But it was a waterfall. Water, [...]
Two Poems
Diagram of the Carnal Male
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Top
It’s not enough to want him open
you have to pry, wrench, lie, spit, sidle
your tongue-noise along his hear-holes, beg
like wolf to pig: I will fry you in your own grease.
It’s just enough to want him open, the rest is in
the finger-mouth-epithet triumvirate, spitting
coarse [...]
Fakiness
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You watch fake news. You say it’s because you hate the real news. And you claim the real news is faker than the fake news, the fake news being the only news that tells the truth.
You ask “But what is The Truth?” waiting for the other person [...]
Communion
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I smiled nervously and thought, This is strange and funny but sort of sexy… I thought of my new lover and how this could make a great kinky scene. I knew he was waiting. I never did well with silences. I heard the priest place his palm [...]
May Day
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I chipped my bottom front tooth wrestling with Codrut in his fancy flat in the center of the city. Codrut was the son of a secret police officer who was not so secret and who was not an officer (he was an interrogator; a genius at pulling [...]
Letters From.
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Letter #1
I’m sorry that I could not tell you,
that I never learned to speak,
that my silence makes you shift your weight as though turning or bracing for a blow and
that you say it makes you uncomfortable,
that you made his hands arch as though from aching or in [...]
Excerpt from “In One Storyâ€
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In one story, the two sisters met in high school. One was a senior, the other a freshman. For whatever reason, they were drawn to one another. The senior was excited each day to see the freshman pass by her. The freshman was a little less sure [...]
Now that’s what I call love!
My mom’s friend, who thinks she’s my therapist, asked me the other day-
“Naomi, why all the affairs? What’s that all about?â€
I tried to smile and shrug it off but my therapist was very serious. She wanted a deep answer. Before I could say anything though, she raised her hand to [...]
Why My Grandfather Had All Those Bessie Smith Records
He left school at thirteen and joined his brother’s jitney business, carrying passengers during the day. At night they delivered whiskey to juke joints in Deep Ellum. Laughter and her blues floated out into darkness, where he sat alone with the goods, listening, clutching a razor and his brother’s gun.