10.6 / November & December 2015

While I don’t expect you to derive any meaning from this overture, Jacques wrote,—it is not a story that will, in the words of my former mentor, save lives—you may nevertheless find in its narrative architecture a simulacrum of your own indescribable pain...

There had been the guest’s lavatory visit—to summarize. She did so want to be comfortable then and for the rest of her life. She had been hiking her skirt and pulling down her undergarment, just trying not to fall apart. Once back in the foyer, she brought out a gift for her host.

My ex-husband was defined by his loose pile of ambitions. They were madnesses dressed in functional clothing. He vaguely served society. Common good like a bright shade of lipstick, black heels in the sink. Look. My ex-husband went on these talking binges. By himself, monologues. He would start and not stop.

Say it’s Main Street & I’m holding a black 8-ball against the felt of my palm— its heft could dent plaster. Say I’ve shot tequila off a baby changing table in a public restroom.

People tell Jana to expect Inmate 144416 to need time, space. They encourage her to take him camping when he gets paroled. Have The Inmate breathe in forest air, press his fingers against sticky bark, look at paw prints in the cool dirt. Take him canoeing.

You have a condition. That’s what your gynecologist tells you. You’re seventeen and sitting in an exam room dressed in a paper robe and want desperately to be anywhere but here.

Save for Slovakia, the word for language changes at each adjacent border. A dialect, a dilatation. A detection of proper pronunciation.

We have desperate running through us. We cut sadness into hills like rain. We move our bodies—fast, big, bronzed/brown/bold—against and through street corners, front doors, turnstiles, trapdoors, dragging unhappiness behind us on a leash.

Leslie liked to drink bottled beer, gripping the necks a little too hard. She liked to wait until they worked up a little sweat, drinking them at room temperature.

Every night, it wanders up the dirt road winding above my old hometown. My family is inside with my sick mother, who rests in a bed in a strange new house and I wait in the garage with a machete...

They need no fences. The smell is enough to ward off curious hikers, teens throbbing to trespass, most wildlife.

Give me your body: your elbows, your aches...

Picnic for the ones left behind is despite its name a festivity, unsomber, casual. It’s immediate family only, meaning not those bound only by marriage and blood but those made family in kindness and who have made it this far in the same rough caravan or assemblage; that’s strict.

First, I had pointed out the unfamiliar garment in the hamper. And then you accused me of hysteria, after which I became interested in laundry soaps: buying in bulk, oxidizing formulas, potions to remove mildew, because sometimes mildew happens in places you do not expect.

When we first met he said it was an accident with a car. His skin, puffed out, swollen, ashen and bruised. He could barely make words from his mouth. There were cuts on his face and hands, drool on his chin. He pointed to speak. His finger did not possess a nail.

You wanted a typewriter but instead they gave you a litany of steel mills reclining in Allegheny valleys. It was every day after Sunday and the truck would not start. The lights went out one by one in the vinyl clothed house. This was your health failing like a marriage.

Once upon a time there was a boy born with a ginormous mouth. Why did I say it that way? The boy’s mouth wasn’t bigger than any other mouth in the land, but that didn’t stop everyone from telling him to “shut it!”