Writing

Selected publications include:

“Handwashing Dishes”
The Southeast Review, September 2021

You find yourself in Phoenix in your mother’s dark kitchen amid piles of dirty dishes, glasses, pots, and baking pans.

The cabinets are empty because everything has been used—except for the plastic spoon that came free with the canned dog food years ago.

Mom never liked the dishwasher. Inside it’s pristine, except for some cobwebs. The door seals have rotted away so that it would leak if you tried to use it.

[creative nonfiction continues in Southeast Review]

“The Choice”
Phi Kappa Phi Forum, spring 2020

I would not wish you to pass.
I would press my hand into your palm
and hope my distress stirs you to choose.
Override the machines. Grab on or let go.

I would press my hand into your palm
and pray for a reflex, anything.
Override the ventilator. Grab on or let go.
Breathe or stop on your own.

[ poem continues in Phi Kappa Phi Forum]

“To Walk Chalk”
Superstition Review 21

Waiting alone in the century-old kitchen, Claire slumped at the table and smoothed the curling foil label on her father’s last whiskey bottle. She had found his bottles, from retired to still-sealed, hidden around her childhood home for months after he died. “Damn,” she whispered. If a couple fingers of his whiskey were still here, maybe he couldn’t be so far away after all…     

[short story continues in Superstition Review]

“Shedding”
Midwest Review 4

Entering the Chicago Art Annex on Wednesday evening felt like trespassing. Normally this would have bothered Jayne, but the sugar binges and atonement fasts of the past few days had left her feeling rinsed out. All she could do was trudge forward, which at this moment meant finding a sliver of space on the crowded elevator.

Distracted by the scrum of students who juggled coats, scarves, lattes, portfolios, and art supplies, she began to step out when the metal doors screeched open. She brushed her wavy hair out of her eyes in time to realize that this was the third floor—where Thomas had his life class. This was the floor where he painted the models he talked so much about…     

[short story continues in Midwest Review]

“The Occasional Death”
cream city review 34.1

While I watch the painter tarp the windows on my stucco condo, he garners about as much per hour as my mother who might at that moment be clipping the pubic hair, scrubbing, and draping an anesthetized great-grandmother’s pelvis.

While the painter connects the hoses and O-rings of his power sprayer, my mother may be organizing the scopes and thoracic instruments needed to explore the mass left in an accountant’s lung after decades of smoking…     

[creative nonfiction continues in cream city review]

“Grumbelina’s Tomatoes”
Blue Mesa Review 22

Grumbelina, the Tomato Woman, or la Mujer de Tomate, for that’s what we called her, was notorious for two things. She grew the oblong, yellow tomatoes that no one else in the neighborhood could grow. They barely resembled tomatoes, but their taste was beyond divine. The secret was in the skin, she claimed. The tough skins condensed all the flavor of the biggest, ripest beefsteaks into odd, squiggly fruits the size of newborns’ fists…     

[short story continues in Blue Mesa Review]

“Pica”
Porcupine Literary Arts Magazine 10.1

At thirty-six weeks I craved ice,
dreamed about ice, plotted to get ice.
The ice I most wanted
was chewy, partially melted,
not sharp, not hard—
cloudy cubes filled with impurities from tap water.
[poem continues in Porcupine]