10.1 / January & February 2015

Cave cities in crater walls collect shelves with books with impossible marginalia where their readers were really just drifting off, but wanted to promise future possessors they’d uncovered the deepest meanings.

The Wife says goodbye. She places her hands around the Husband’s neck, kisses him lightly. You’ll be fine, she says. The Husband walks away from her, led from the elbow by a woman dressed in scrubs.

After spending all morning in the children’s service, it turns out to be time for yiskor, but I stay anyway—this room a home, this hallway a village, this trashcan a landfill, this stage a sanctuary.

The chopper comes in hard through a fishnet of fire, pitches back landing, explodes twenty meters up, folding in half around a pair of enemy RPGs, flaming tumors bursting from its belly and flank.

My first glimpse of the Salton Sea was from the top of a rocky hill at Joshua Tree National Park. Looking north was a desert basin filled with crumpled, dry sagebrush.

“Whither we cannot fly we must go limping”

When I was in Asheville I bought three pairs of locally made, handmade panties. You wouldn’t think that panties were something that would be locally made and handmade but in the case of Asheville I found several different vendors and purveyors of locally made panties.

Marcello against that backdrop of yellow grass. Dry, dirt-riddled air. He’s talking about being born from the elements. Forget my parents, he says. Pints of warm wine. His arms are spread, we both reek. It’s better than Francesco. No car, but we don’t mind the walk. At his cousin’s house, more wine.

Sometimes at night in our small village the abuelos would come but not abuelos like you think, not parents of my parents sweet bearing gifts and unconditional love, but terrifying figures in masks and strange outfits on horseback, breathing loudly and calling for the children to present themselves. Cariños, my father would say, go outside.

and I’ll show you a happy camper, crowed the ghost of Thoreau to no one in particular, who just happened to be his best friend, btw.

It’s 3:00 a.m. and I’m picking my cuticles to the Muzak when in walks Lube Guy. I haven’t seen him in almost a week. Five minutes later he’s at my register, with two heads of lettuce this time and—naturally—a big tube of personal lubricant. “Gonna make a salad?” I ask. He’s mid-forties, fattish.

If your father is convicted of a felony for drug possession—six industrial-sized garbage bags filled with red hash confiscated underneath his double-wide, with intent to manufacture, sell, and/or deliver to buyers such as history scholars with thin mustaches, pool sharks who play better in a haze, roadhouse musicians, tattoo-heavy bikers, pubescent youth working at the

That we found it at all seemed a miracle, though we were the ones who hid it here in the ground behind the long-silent school where we mostly hated each other. That didn’t matter now, together in the dark, afraid to be found digging for things we’d thought safe to bury.