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This morning, I step outside to pick strawberries, no coat. That’s not a good idea, my whole family tells me, one by one, through a half-open door. I’m trying to convince myself that someone is stirring milk and a little honey into your oatmeal. Someone is shaking her head, Nope, you can’t wear sandals in winter. There’s no word for who you are to me. Close is ghosts, though
Without the sound of shots fired up the block, like a conversation between blown-out tires, and crickets swelling upto mask the dead air after, without the flashlights of policegrazing the windows, and voices relayed in from neighbors’ yards, what blessing for this hurtling earth would we have left
He had asked her to have drinks in the wax-figure-themed bar attached to the movie theater, though they’re not seeing a movie and though, she will discover, he does not drink. He lives in the same building, on the thirteenth floor, he told her in their early messages, and still manages to be twenty-five minutes late. She orders a bourbon, neat. It had been her father’s drink,
The woman we called Morning limped down Washington Street, asking for a dollar. Everyone knew it was just a matter of time. Government wasn’t an enabler. No Narcan to resurrect zombies. Folks dropped, leaving brown puddles. Heroin ate people. Every day a little thinner, disappearing into clothes like ghosts. Till they were ghosts on Washington forever, their nothingness enough
We were in the jacuzzi when Speedoman entered the pool area and our lives. There were five of us, all sitting spaced apart, the warm water bubbling up to our hairy chests. Outside, it was gray and snowing, the roads icy. We came to the Ford Community Center in the heart of Dearborn, Michigan, every Saturday afternoon to work out—intense cardio followed by weight training—and