"Is it hard?" I asked my childhood friend. I couldn't remember his name--the name of the baby she'd lost. I hadn't been close to her for years. Her arrival at the wilderness guard station where I …

A woman on a bicycle is wearing a red silk scarf next to a signpost where I once ate a split-open coconut smothered in lime juice. I click the arrow on my computer screen. The image shifts further …

The young waiter at the back bar was happy that we had joined him and asked us what we wanted to drink. I asked if he had any tequila. Of course he did. It was a flamenco bar and a little balding man …

Of the parts of animals some are simple: to whit I am sun damaged skin rotting on deepening layers of flesh and ligaments, organs and bones...

One of the swans was murdered; he was stabbed in the night. Swans mate for life, so his mate grieved. She lay on the steps of the boardwalk that traced the pond, head bowed into her legs. Tourists …

When I was a girl with a book in my hand I could go to a place so deep no one could follow. No one cared to, except my mother, an affectionate woman who smarted at her lack of companionship. She must …

In Storm Lake, Iowa, a public park is home to the Living Heritage Tree Museum--an assemblage of historic trees. Not the trees who themselves witnessed history, but their descendants--grown from …

The architect’s website for my hometown prison features wispy watercolors of blue skies, blotted cotton clouds, a border of poplar leaves above rings of razor wire.

Though perhaps he never debated it at all. Perhaps he was only waiting for the right stretch of road, a field with grass tall enough to hide a body.

The buildings were rundown and whatever light came from them was like the leftover glow of an all-night party. Tonight, those same lights were electrified, lit up along the grid.

Chaie mikhai?                                                                                          Yes please. Merci amoo. He carries a small tea …

And when there were no more to kill, I kicked the flowers, sent bursts of petals coursing through the air. My legs got tired—I wrapped fingers around stems, started ripping them up, choked them …

Catherine of Siena ladled the pus from a cancer patient’s sore, lifted the spoon to her lips and sipped till the desire for food spasmed from her stomach...

Away we went, Sissy. Do you remember? Do you remember running across the meadow, into the fields, through the woods until we made it to the red sand...

Six years ago, in the autumn after I graduated college, I got a job in a coffee shop staffed almost exclusively by gay ex-meth addicts from Texas. They all hated me. Upon reflection, I think my …

By morning, our tongues were covered with fuming blisters, prickly like scorpion bicchuu grass, growing between the gaps in silica-laden stones laid down the path to the Haida Khan temple, right …

If the umbilical cord stretches straight, the baby will live a life of ease, but if it is looped around itself, the child will grow strange and have a wild imagination. If it is looped around her …

My dog haunts me, too. The worst ghosts are the ones that are alive. You yearn for them, and yet you have no closure. They continue breathing and eating and sleeping and dreaming. And you do the …

At the time of my Uncle John’s death in the intensive care unit of the hospital up in Fargo, Minnesota, he had in his possession one leather jacket with attached liner, one pair of sweatpants size …

Level one is the snow and level two is a parking garage and level three is a room full of books. Level four is the middle of the night and level five is the summer, beers and water bottles, cookies …