Walking home around 4PM last fall, I spotted a can in the middle of the sidewalk. Strikingly silver and apparently full, since it wasn’t blown over. No logo, no nutrition facts, no label, only the reflected sun and these words, in shaky black Sharpie: CUM CAN, PLZ DRINK.
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Bermuda grass is a weed, in my mind. Something unwanted, with a root system extending 35 feet down into the bowels of the wash that runs through my neighborhood. A friend told
Winner of the Sonora Review Issue 80 Nonfiction Contest, selected by Melissa
Jaimeson Oakley (He/They) is a trans/queer writer from the hills of Lucasville,
Shock On Friday before Halloween weekend I was, at long last, pregnant. I’d taken the day off to prepare for my favorite holiday and to go to my first ultrasound appointment as
Apple peels curling pinkly on the kitchen table, their white meat tart and cold when I bit into their crescent shapes. Because I was five or six or seven even, I didn’t find
“It’s not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out the window.” —Wallace Stevens, Letters (1966) * * * “Where do you want the window?” Everett asks, standing on the unframed
Ryan and I had decided we were too old to be parents. We’d just met too late in life for this to happen, and the fiscal reality that we were teachers meant
this essay was first published in THE DEAD ARE GODS (Melville House, 2023) I am not really a believer. I suppose the best way to describe myself would be atheist, but then
Voronezh, Russia, 26 December 2018 When I got off the bus, my grandmother was there at the bus stop in her brown fur hat and long mink coat. She had owned them
I sit on the rough cement steps of a country convenience store, keeping an eye on Mom. She’s been on the phone for at least an hour. She has a pile of
What are your plans for Mother’s Day? Your question tightens my belly, squeezes my chest, constricts my throat. Your question leaves me gasping for words. Can you tell? When you ask it?
We’re slicing through the Sonoran Desert on Highway 286 in a water supply truck operated by Humane Borders. Faint yellow light rises into the sky behind the mountains, letting us know that
Existing. That was what the weeks after the funeral felt like—a string of continual stresses from the mountain of immediate family responsibilities, punctuated with pangs of overwhelming sadness, and then those sudden
