Stories

When she sleeps, Shakespeare writes one more sonnet we’ll never read.

Children are never old enough to understand their parents’ affairs.

The five notes, slowly, over & over, and with some light intent.

There was a glint of cold red light out there, on the other shore of the lake.

To resist him, I danced how he wanted, but made a mockery of it.

I hear her voice in the shivering tambourines of leaves.

Your soul feels old and familiar like a book that opens to my favorite pages.

He knows what she’s seeking, and he knows she won’t find it.

That’s why Mam drinks whiskey. That’s why he drinks whiskey too.

We walk in light so steep I can see each single stitch of your sweater.

I grew accustomed to seeing the sun rise and set from the school.

He’s weirdly hard to pay attention to, even when he’s threatening you.

I only feel that here, only here, in this one place, a small rise.

Why do girls want to cheerlead? Don’t they know it objectifies women?

Something crossing the Golden Gate catches the sun and ignites.

Why kill something so mild-mannered, entertaining, and sociable?

Suddenly, all of the past seemed now like the same endless race.

Sleepy and pensive, July succumbed to the day’s isolating heat.

Think of the fish whose stripes appear only on cooking through. Fold each thought: the highway stop where toilet paper is piled.

This body is all I have, I say. Some days it is still not enough.

Now the ashes were real, the pepper trees reduced to stubs.

In a future we believe in, these plants will all be ghosts.

He doesn’t notice the cop car rolling slow-motion into the station.

This must be what it’s like to be seen by God as we inch toward the infinite.

I have given everything at the wrong time, to the wrong people.

Leigh Wells

I do not want to fall prey to the bewitchment of my mind by language.

When I dream of lovers, I rarely see faces. It’s better if we never touch.

You can learn to exhale. Let the marrow of dusk leak onto your knees. Tongues rattling, we are scared into daughters again & again. The act of silence: heavy as rain. Heavy enough to believe in.