I hadn’t gotten pregnant yet, but I could still feel the baby in me. Heavy, slimy movement. A soft cramping. We named her Frankie because it made us laugh. The name was hard and sturdy but also playful and full of life. At night I would ask Drew to touch my stomach. Our little ritual. Did you say goodnight to…
Did you know forelsket means falling in love for the first time? Humans go bananas for that word during courtship. I went over it in yesterday’s bot seminar, “So You Want to Scam Norwegian Widows. How to Come Off Like a Native Speaker and Not Fresh Off the Boat.” Our catfish bots closed upwards of three million kroner yesterday alone!…
“Of course your back hurts,” my wife said. “That’s what you get for doing CrossFit.” For the first time in fifteen years, I was back at the gym on the regular—swinging kettlebells, doing burpees, jerking and contorting. I had just turned forty, and all this exercise seemed like a mild midlife crisis. When the doctor escorted me to the front…
Sugar Hexany We’re already on dangerous ground — your voice does to me what music does ; is what I mean when I describe spending time with you … is spending time with the world , levántame baby in that which shimmers . How walking through grass cleanses the feet — the art that occurred in a vacuum ; minced…
“Five more minutes, then we get out and change our clothes,” I repeat twice. Shomik alternates between dog paddling and flipping himself in the water. I revel at his ease and imagine the sensation of respite, of weightlessness in a heavy world. Shumita, his sister, a first grader, plunges to collect plastic frogs and goldfish at the bottom of the…
Christopher’s crying in the stairwell. He’s been at it for hours. I’m concerned about what the neighbors will think, but also I don’t care, so I shut the door and fall back into bed. I turn and press my head into the pillow. I bury it so far, it’ll never be found, and just when I’ve reached the lowest point,…
Mr. B When I asked Mr. B about solar wind, he said there was no such thing, in front of the whole class. I was pretty sure he was wrong, and he was: solar wind is a stream of charged particles, mostly protons, released from the upper atmosphere of the sun and permeating the whole solar system. You can harness…
For most of a minute, the tenor splits his stare between his phone and the lake view framed by the minivan’s windshield. Then he sets the device in the cupholder. The other three members of the group wait in silence. Finally, from the back seat, the bass speaks. “What’s it say?” The tenor swallows. “It was all a joke.” “That…
This year, the front yard is a garden gone wild. An unruly thing. A bobbing field of bitter arugula. The herbage is higher than my waist. The sunflowers are already taller than me, and the bushy hop vine reached the top of its pole weeks ago. The intersection, an offset, four-way stop, is surrounded on three corners by mature trees:…
Sink into your parents’ plastic pool, painted mosaics on polypropylene liner, PVC flamingo floats, neon orange rafts turn your skin whiter (exsanguinate eyelids, cheekbones keen), cherry stone freckles sit– mistaken unsinkable seeds. For all of the Sylvias shivering away ventricle remnants of nostrum– (remember when you went around the world?) please don’t end here. Come out from under– water,…