I can’t remember why “boomerang” brings me so painfully into my own sights. The medicine has stopped nothing, nor was it intended to. These twin jars of split peas, I boil them for days. They will not soften, as I do. I try to work up the nerve to listen to some music. Is it so wrong to end a sentence with a pronoun? I haven’t licked a stamp for years, not with this tongue. You have to run to taste the wind, says my dog from his leash, says my friend from Orofino, to his. Chase the grass, then, in the wind down a long hill. Suffering is not, as it turns, its own schadenfreude. My friend stayed wrong about that. My stomach: still tender where she shot it, though I did not feel anything at the time. I felt nothing. It was quicker than the fall of an eyelash. The beauty berry bushes have spread, and their day-glo fruit hangs in bends throughout the forest. Words that matter can’t be words.
Further Reading
Recluse
by Melissa King Rogers
We were drawn to them the way kids crave adults who are not their parents, camp coaches we could carve out crushes on and not feel creepy. He was a grizzly, big hands, a mean spiral. He called the plays in pick-up football after Prayer Circle where they’d one-up each other for the roughest sack […]
Husks by Ivan Young
To understand the texture of sunlight she watches the gull dip its bill into the opened chamber of a crab. It mauls the meat into droplets, rich with rot and brine. She thinks of swimming to a sandbar as a girl, the corset of breath when the ocean floor dropped away, the burn in her […]
Cows and Wows: Why India Works Depite Itself and What We Can Learn from Its Example
by David Kirby (photos by Barbara Hamby)
PUT YOUR STAMP ON LILI When Barbara says she wants to go to India, the first thing I say is, “I’m not driving in that cockamamie country.” When it comes to driving in other countries, mine is a checkered history. I still don’t know what the traffic signs mean in France and Italy, and I’ve got […]
