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November 20, 2024
As a big surprise for her birthday, I gave in and bought the dog she’d been wanting for a long time. A frisky little caramel-colored dachshund she immediately named Fredo after the weak Corleone brother in The Godfather, her favorite movie. I thought it an odd name but it was her choice and her dog.
November 13, 2024
Translated from Chinese by Deanna Ren
In the South, on the nights of a sweltering summer, we children like to sleep in the middle of the road. No cars pass by overnight; everyone plops their water-cooled bamboo beds outside, and the moment of excitement arrives. Ah, the corpse drivers! Ah, the Spider Demon King! Ah, the Milky Way!
November 6, 2024
His body had been in the trunk some hours already when she began to feel him next to her in the cab as well. She couldn’t see him at first, could only sense he was there. But soon the hair on her right arm stood up and the air beside her began to shimmer. Before she began to see him fully, she whipped her gaze away.
October 30, 2024
This house isn’t haunted, has never been, but that will change when, some years from now, I will sometimes feel a chill, and sometimes I will feel alone, and sometimes a voice will say, “Who are you and what have you done with Donna?” And I will try to respond, but I won’t know who Donna is, won’t even know a Donna. I fear I might someday learn.
October 23, 2024
People like to believe they have influence over disasters, catastrophes, losses—by which they mean control—but that’s illusion, and she was done with illusion. Could she write that in her report? You’re all suffering under an illusion. Instead, she picked up the phone and texted: Island//illusion. Illusion//island. They sound the same when you say them enough. There’s a word for that, but I can’t remember it now. I can’t remember anything clearly. All my words are inverted and mirrored. edrorrim. See?
October 16, 2024
Last night I was certain
[   ]you were there with a gift
light balanced against shadow

fugitives move along fence lines
cities burning[   ]
we’re asked to send money
cities burn
where are the plans
there were no bells, no sirens, no warning[   ]the cities burned
 
October 9, 2024
Flattened stone floor, covered
in wooden slats, the portico
with columns and even arches,
not exactly the porch
the other house (our same floor
plan doubled into something else)
had across our common grass.
October 2, 2024
It is not a beautiful day in Mexico City unless you can see Popocatépetl. In this place, beauty is determined solely by whether or not the volcano breaches the nebulous smog like a visitation, by whether the eye can ascend its snow-covered face. When what was sensed but veiled yesterday is suddenly revealed today, it is, in the smallest way, a faith realized.
 
September 25, 2024
My eyes were already fixed on the face
Of My Lady, and my mind with them—
All other thoughts had been wiped away.

She wasn’t smiling; instead, she began:
“If I were smiling, you’d become
Like Semele when she was turned to ashes,
September 18, 2024
We were picnicking on the plains
when she emerged from the rushes.
She wore an apricot smock.
Her face was smeared with soot.
She said her name was Stina Groth.
A cloud of bats burst from the chimney
of a crumbling cottage behind her.
We asked her where home was.
She drew a circle in the silt with a twig.
September 11, 2024
With floret centers so prolific
they turn—furred caterpillar folds?
zipped mouths? burn marks?—
the quite contrary daisy faces grow
dense in Mary’s garden.
September 4, 2024
He woke from a dream.

He was in the garage of an old house,
riding one of those toy horses
held to a metal frame by springs.
It was not very fast, not very curious
about the horizon.
August 21, 2024
I made sandwiches with the bresaola from the antipasto the afternoon before and some of the gouda I'd cut thinner from the cubes. I tried to feed the boy some of the gouda and a little bread, but he wouldn't have any. I suspected it was the traces of vinegar, they clashed with the white bread—it was all we had—or maybe it was just an odd new combination of flavors he didn't understand yet. But what was left over would likely get lost in the refrigerator where things were perpetually being pushed back behind more saved food, this striated order of aging and forgetting—food saved until eating what was left at the far back was unwise. Like memory, the economy of our minds repressing one moment for the next and leaving the past like a set of traps that might go off at any moment.
August 14, 2024
Maybe the Leather Skulls were no longer the titans of the death metal scene they used to be in the late eighties. Were they titans then? They had a following, a snug cult of enthusiasts. Their admirers were scarcer now, sure, but as they circled the continent on their latest comeback tour in honor of their eleventh album, The Devils He Casteth Out, the band could still fill bars and small ornate theaters with diehards—haggard bikers and their biker wives, with jazzed up hair and fatal shades of lipstick. The concerts were like nostalgia galas, reenactments of the past. One more spin on the crazy train.
 
August 7, 2024
A trench of barkless trees. Slim black sweater
arched like a claw. Thimbles of the heart and spine
overflown. The halfway trucks, the drivers inside
dislodge wax from their bodies to the tune of a pulverizing
sun streak. Up toward Ohio, geometry for the pupils
to control light. I treat the shoulder as range,
July 31, 2024
I am the screen of heaven,

homely and undone, strand

by strand, whose

scant beauty emits

glare, distracting from

the absence it

would be, and

desires to become.
July 24, 2024
On Valentine’s Day, Milo strings a horse-shaped piñata from the ceiling light in our living room, and I walk by twice before noticing it swaying there. The light is off and the horse is dark, but I am not unobservant. Part of me accepts a horse swinging in my periphery. Milo makes up a real reason for me to go back down the hall and, when I look for the space heater, I find the horse hanging. He dangles from a yellow jump rope, and I am so happy to see him in my house. Milo hands me the stick. “You need,” he says, “to kill a horse.”
 
July 17, 2024
There is the man on the moon. Go to him. Get bread from him, drink his water. Take your dog, Blue to him. Take your mother. She is skiing outside around the house. Stop her, tell her that Blue is going also. Take the gander, Henry. He is short in the legs. Leave me Iris. I have seen her eat feed in a pattern.
 
July 10, 2024
Marcie decided on Vertigo because she’d recently encountered several texts in quick succession that made extensive reference to it: Chris Marker’s time travel film told in still images, La Jetée, Terry Gilliam’s unlikely Hollywood adaptation, 12 Monkeys, and a story by Bennett Sims called “White Dialogues” about an embittered academic seething in an auditorium during a lecture being given by the hot new thing in Hitchcock studies. The coincidence made her feel involved with the film, and vice versa, in a way that evades more specific description.
July 3, 2024
We slapped together two clods of oak around a broken bedpan lid and twined them together with a horsetail. Realized then our discovery: the first knife ever. We go to Tony’s. Tony indicates our find—What is that shit?—and he slides us each a prairie fire: whisky, tabasco. Crab says, Maybe lean forward, Tony, and Tony, doing so, discovers the knife sinking in buttery smooth, right between his ribs.