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Family and Relationships
Bella
How do you know when it’s time to take your autistic, bipolar twelve-year-old daughter to the psych ward? (They call them “behavioral units” now.) Is it when you find yourself sitting on her back and holding her arms to the ground while your wife lies on her legs? When she head-butts you the first time? The fifth? When she spits in your face?
March 2017
Death Of A Fisherman
We lived in a place between mountains in the trout lands. The fish dwelt in the chill of eternal movement, slick and lithe and beautiful, in the curve of sapphire rivers twinkling with western sun. This was why we’d moved to Montana when I was a boy — to chase fish, in the church of my father’s religion.
March 2017
Getting Into Bed On A December Night
When I slip beneath the quilt and fold into / your warmth, I think we are like the pages / of a love letter
February 2017Selling The Old Family Volvo
The young couple and their two small sons / Drive from the city to pay for and take the keys / To my old family Volvo — a car, like a house, / Full of memories, full of departures and returns.
February 2017
What Love Looks Like From Here
We’ve been married nearly forty years, but we are still learning from my parents what love looks like: How it moves. All the shapes it takes. Though my parents can no longer care for themselves, they care for each other.
February 2017
Pretty Women
Later I showed my evidence. I had text messages of course; everyone always has text messages. The text message is now the lipstick on the collar, and the worst thing is that, much like the lipstick, it only hints at what really is going on.
January 2017
Scotty
The story begins with a message on Facebook: “I’m looking for Wayne Scott from the Baltimore area. A Navy veteran, about seventy-two or seventy-three. A relative of yours by any chance?” A phone call to my mother confirms that my father, whose name I inherited and who was close-lipped about his past, had dropped out of high school and joined the Navy when he was seventeen.
January 2017
The Edge Of The World
The wide sweep of the northern Gulf of Mexico and the Apalachee Bay is in perpetual motion, reshaping, and at times reclaiming, my front yard. Alligator Harbor, with its clear shallows and deceptive currents — pulled by the moon, the sun, the trickster we call weather — defines and sculpts my backyard, revising boundaries and property lines, confounding appraisers and owners alike.
January 2017
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