The first tongue was a woman. Not her name. Not her story. Barely a laugh in my ear. A nape. The vapor of a body passing beside mine. The way something in me salivated…
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I don’t know how the heat begins, I only know how it rises inside me with intensity, pressing along my arms and into my face, seeking release, breaking and then returning again. Dante did not possess ovaries, but I feel I must be condemned to suffer in an existence similar to the one he described in the Inferno, these agitating cycles of burning and longing…
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Deep in the Cuyamaca mountains sits an old mining town called Julian, known for its apple pie. How we got there, I don’t remember, but we took my father’s gold Toyota. We drove South toward Calexico on the Mexicali border. Sixty-two miles from Yuma and one hundred and twenty miles from San Diego—no place for two suburban kids…
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I rub my hands over hot sand the way I would my husband’s back, pausing over the imperfections and careful not to kick up dust. I rub my hands over his back, too. Faster and without pause. Anticipation of discovery that’s only possible between two strangers ready to learn each other in real time…
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The ring’s cost came to low triple digits, and I wondered if I could use it one day to propose to him again. The next week, I met a man named Chance at a Polaroid conference. As we exchanged contacts, I saw his very Dutch surname and very un-American suffix—II—as in the second, rather than junior. He joked with a prepared line: he was a second chance…
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Further down Thomas Jefferson Parkway, beyond the confederate flag and past the s-curves, there's another huge wound of trees pulled from the earth. Red clay truck tracks fan out both ways from it, stretching down the asphalt like a bloodstain. You wanna know what they put there, once they paid someone to remove the rootballs and skeletons?
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