Driving home from my parent’s house On Father’s Day. Feeling guilty For almost hugging him—for Touching his arm instead. We sit Outside while my brother cooks Hamburgers and my nephew Enjoys his new BB gun. An Extended family of flies Lands, two at a time, on every Surface—even the barrel. We Wave them away until our arms Get tired. Mom sits across from Me and she points over my Shoulder at the solitary Crow perched in a cypress tree. He’ll be here long after we’re gone, She says, and I notice she keeps Her inhaler close at hand now. It’s my security blanket, She says. I worry about her More now. And I don’t know what to Say when my brother finally Embraces her.
Jeff Goldblum was maddening. Mitzy lay in bed, naked to the ceiling fan’s rotations, sweat beading on her cleavage, her stomach, everything. Jeff would not take his eyes off her, that stare so moody, so dark, just like Jurassic Park.
“What are you going to do to me, Goldblum.” She parted her dry lips.
The dark philosopher would not reply, just hummed under his breath. Why anybody paid to watch him front the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, she couldn’t imagine. No musical talent. Just an atonal whine. No, his talents lay elsewhere and were of the pectoral variety.
How she had ended up here, trapped in her bed, held hostage by this handsome fiend she didn’t know, except she never should’ve had drinks with that man last week, the one whose Tinder profile said he was an electrician.…
My father never spends money without purpose. If a selfless father purchases extra pastries for his daughter’s enjoyment, buys instruments to gift his daughter the wonders of music, encourages his daughter to earn decent grades so she can achieve her dream job, or pays his daughter’s tuition for the fun of attending a prestigious school, then my father is not a selfless father. Rather, my father lives with a selfish investment in the cultural expectation of filial piety.
Before high school, I attended Carmel Valley Middle School—a campus littered with scabs of gum stuck to the cement grounds; where kids throw pencils at the ceiling, cheering whenever one punctures the styrofoam, or where kids, tucked in black beanies, oversized sweatshirts, and ripped jeans, swap bags of meth behind the history buildings.…
Roy Lichtenstein. Credit: Bill Ray. Printed with permission – billraypix/Marlys Ray, 6/2022
The picture above is a photograph (captured by photographer Bill Ray) of the artist Roy Lichtenstein sitting amongst four of his paintings at a New York art gallery. It is hanging in my second-floor hallway, just to the right of the upstairs port of my chair lift. I face it when I depart the lift, and since I stand up slowly, I have time to appreciate its complexity.
Please focus on the picture in the upper right corner where the anonymous woman says: IT’S -IT’S NOT AN ENGAGEMENT RING. IS IT?
They are a handsome couple in a conventional sense. Dressed well and expensively, especially in view of the double-stranded pearl necklace Betsy is wearing.…
I very much dislike being at a buffet – Mary Ruefle
I stand in the stairwell say to him that he and I aren’t going to work out, him being a cowboy, aspiring cop. He marries a librarian. I go on to psychedelics, sit-ins, join a cult,
marry and move to a place he would’ve hated. My mother tells me, twenty years in, she’s heard he still has my picture on his mantle. You never lose the first he-was-everything-to-me.
I’ve googled him over the years, imagined how a call might go, nearly did one summer.
The sunlight explores the walls of the apartment we share like a rabid cockroach. I crack the body with a firm stomp, one foot— shoeless. Together, the dog I call the love of my life, and I hold a small service.
The dog has a few nice things to say. I cry for the third time today. The body lays in a planter on the fire escape, three inches down in the dirt, where a month later grows a peony, your favorite flower, clearly in love with the light.
When her parents fought, and Melissa had blunted all her colors to stubs, she would crank open the window and take herself off the trailer park, unseen. The oppressive Tennessee summer often baked the inhabitants of her two-bedroomed, ten-by-twenty-eight-foot home; and she understood from a young age that heat, combined with all-day drinking, made both grown-ups so dehydrated they were delirious even in their raving.
The first time she’d thought of this solution, she’d been nine years old and tall for her age; a peculiar child prone to fits of imagination. But who could blame her? For until then she’d known only the closet, candy pink pajamas, and Push-Pops for tea. The very shadows on the wall came alive to keep her company; they danced just for her.…
