A Good House Cleaner
A Necessary Matter
A Piece of Advice
After Terebenev’s “Map of Russia and Its Peoples” (1866)
At the Memory Home
Best Practices
Chase the Rabbit
Deer Hunt
Just This Morning
Kidnap Is Sorta Like Babysit
Petaling Jaya
Renegades
Sister in the Orchard
Symmetry
Types
What Comes Through the Ceiling
Symmetry
Kanako Shimizu
Jesse’s left arm came
back hairy that spring,
freed from his signed cast
and the funk that stayed
sharp in the air whenever
he raised his hand.
His arm hairs were grainy
as if he’d forgotten to
towel off beach sand and lay
like dark brown rush grass
blown southeast. Strangely,
his right arm was
smooth as ours, still a kid’s.
Half a man, back when we
were all trying to be.
For years, I imagined it was
the dampness of his cast that
made it fertile, that it was a
chrysalis hanging off
his elbow. That his kid arm
got pulped and processed
in the dim space—
the matrix of what’s left
rebuilding itself anew. That his arm
then emerged and looked up
into the light. That it touched
the wind. Was shaken free.