“Our angel,” one woman said. She was holding a gilt-framed photograph of Selena singing on stage. She did look like an angel. I wanted to lie down on the laundry room floor.
A man should know how to butcher his own bird.
Anyone who claims that a swan is a majestic and noble creature has never seen a swan up close or smelled its bacterial purge.
We woke pale and thirsty, the plastic sheet sticking to our bodies. Joan’s breathing stuttered as she moved her head in the crook of my shoulder and then she was quiet. There were things that we would do for one another, sacrifices we would make, and the proof was now before us as plain as an hour in the day.
The home remains. Even if the house were razed, the foundation scored and broken and the pieces carried away, a spiritual outline of the home in which people cooked dinner or lay down exhausted or looked out the window at the garbage truck rumbling down the road would persist.
I started doubting the security of my own email connection. Do I have a file in some central office in Beijing? Am I being watched?
This page was once plant material, crushed and sluiced and pressed through a machine in a warehouse, the process looked over by a man plagued with a skin flaking infection.
