It was my father’s— the only thing of worth or history. Patina-ed stainless, oblong, always needing winding, keeping nearly time, and filled with memories we had not spent. Hamilton, seventeen jeweled, a present on the old man’s marriage; passed not by testament but default from undertaker to son, who, in this night table drawer, keeps […]

  Gam This one’s not exactly dirty, just strange. Gam means leg, but while I often say leg, I rarely use gam. Why not? Why not change it up? Well first, I’d get a lot of “Beg your pardon?” Most people don’t know what gam means. Even Word and Gmail underline the word in red […]

The sachem’s council fire is extinguished, the few survivors of the contagion scattered into the woods. The Governor has ordered all returning soldiers to stop outside of towns and be inspected for signs of pestilence. The Selectmen are bound to ensure those with the pox be removed to a place of safety, their clothes burned. […]

Part I. The purest magic in the world is here, a yellow glow inside the “Barl of Fun.” I’m drawn by covert flashes, overhear the shrieks of lucky children who outrun the barrel’s sideways pull. When it’s my turn, a current like an eddy drags me down. The friction of its constant orbit-burn scrapes up […]

English (1800-1825) After Samuel Roberts and George Cadman, Sheffield. It might have been a Vatican chalice, consecrating vessel for water and wine at St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, home to cardinals and popes, but for that ornate spout jutting out, an afterthought when you likely changed your mind. A silver-and-wood-fused voluptuous body, symmetrical and shimmering, […]

So I had this winter job at a junkyard where I stood around a fire in a barrel and warmed my hands until the boss cussed me out. This was the signal to use my fiber blade saw and trim copper pipe from the ends of scrap car radiators. Two or three of us doing […]

I told myself clouds, but stars confronted me, my cosmic ignorance: speed of light, gravity, the workings of clocks, cell division, fossilization, my skin’s elasticity, and some nights the lunar phase that leaves no moon to find. I carried you in circles, eyes angling for crescent, quarter, halo. You pursed your lips, waited for my […]