The girl is seven. The boys are older, maybe nine. From the kitchen window, she watches them try to blow the lid off a garbage can with firecrackers. They hoot and holler. Then they see a cat, and one of the boys grabs the cat and tells the others to run into the garage and […]
The man’s nails dig into my skin, leaving angry red crescents alongside the needle marks in my arms. My feet are folded under me, scraping against the floor as he drags me forward. The man is over six feet tall with a shaved head and stubble on his face, and he reeks of cigarettes. He […]
Right after his bath, she dries him and then gets a Q-tip so there’s wax in his ear canal to stop her, Sophie, a brown recluse spider, as she climbs down his left ear because he sleeps on his right. Sophie finds his ear canal much warmer than the cardboard in the basement, and it’s […]
The poetry reading had been going well. This annual Philly event drew a sizable crowd, but this year—for unexplained reasons—the hall was jammed. Crammed in the third row, at the break I stood to stretch and look around. McQuitty, one of our greatest local poets, was sitting at the end of the last row. I […]