|
|
Fiction
Published as the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award Winner
The wind roars when I emerge with bails
of hay for the dogs, and I quicken my pace.
Once I’m empty handed again, I turn north
to breathe in the biting wind. Beyond the store, spruces and pines hide hushed lakes and interrupt the horizon, sharp incisors gnawing at the tousled sky. The wind comes from the direction of Highway 41 that lays limp and silent.
Turtle Soup
Published in Crab Orchard Review Fall 2007
Will leads the way, pausing to better handle the turtle as big as a garbage can lid. I admire his jagged angles and feel my own expanded weight low in front of me. I scratch at the tightness that set in during my fifth month and envy the turtle’s talons.
Skull
Published in Minnesota Monthly as a Tamarack Award Finalist It was awkward, even embarrassing to explain to the cremator, Henry, that I needed your head. "Weird shit all the time," Henry sighed.  But he obliged, largely because of the note you had written him, a dying man's last wish. The next morning when I returned with brownies and the check, he gave me two boxes. One eerily light, the other nauseatingly heavy. Both weightier than I would have guessed. Both you.
Jaw
Published in Whistling Shade Winter 2005
I knew long before dead Uncle Milton's jaw fell off that I 
wanted to be cremated.
DesirePublished in Speakeasy Winter 2004And I know you must be speaking of our images pressed to gether, my body curving to you and your body protruding to me, depression and recess, reciprocal peaks and ridges. Laying aligned joints together, hollows filled, obelisk enveloped, a new flow runs, the current courses.
|
|