Night Shift
My hands come together prayerful around the whistling hot cupful to wait to sip scorchless to feel its breath grow cool degree by half degree across my lip— A vigil I cannot keep. All day I touch my raw tongue to the back of my teeth. Again, broadside in the Read more
This Just Happens Sometimes
The 8-week appointment couldn’t be scheduled at eight weeks because of Thanksgiving. Instead, I was asked to come in the following week, a few days shy of my 35th birthday. I remembered a friend going to the doctor for a pregnancy confirmation a few months earlier and asked her how Read more
LEGISLATING SEX
Teenagers in Texas can no longer get birth control on their own. The logic of this escapes me just as it did when I was a teenager and my step-father stole my birth control pills out of my purse. He did not want the shame of a pregnant teenage daughter, Read more
Richard’s Mummy
Richard isn’t at school today. He wasn’t there yesterday, either. When I get home, my mother seems sad. She crouches, looking into my eyes with hers. “Richard’s Mummy is – “ My mother has tears now. I don’t ask her why, I wait. I feel uncomfortable. “Richard hasn’t got a Read more
Thunder
Rolls like a kettle-drumon the other side of the passwhere my lover once livedin a plain wooden houseunder a sky that carried weightin its splendor and its solace We saved hours underneaththe dogwood tree, silentholding hands, lightly old-fashionedlovers bent on listening asthe yellow-billed cuckoo sangsadder than the rain Everything I Read more
Amelia Bassano
A mistress at thirteen. Shocking for you – now. Not so for me – then. Juliet was only thirteen when she met, fell in love, and all too hastily, married Romeo. Perhaps that’s where life and art merge? The cloudy yet wholesome translucency of writing from experience. It isn’t a Read more
Midnight’s Talking Lion and the Wedding Fire
Though god might be called conceptual, not perplexing, but a citizen reader cannot help what is left out, what goes unsaid, yet gestured at, what cannot be known, what might be derived from the fraction offered, and who has redacted what (only blocks) and why not say that the reader Read more