In understanding Carmen Maria Machado’s flash story, “Mary When You Follow Her,” I found it helpful to simplify the numerous clauses with a short summary of the narrative: in the autumn, after a series of terrible things occurred to and around Maria, and before another series of terrible things occurred, she caught a bus to…
Sparrow
“There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet I found a remnant of your lifewhen I arrived. Caught on the glass,it fluttered as I slowed until,stopped in the windless room,(like you) it grew still.I had drifted—the sun was behind me, pulling its golden blanket across the late-summer landscape,the war-room…
A Brief Analysis of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Plowman
The “ploughman” is introduced as the brother and accompaniment of the Parson, the pilgrim who directly precedes him in Chaucer’s General Prologue. He is described by the narrator as a “trewe swynkere,” or a ‘true laborer’ as clarified in the Riverside Chaucer Explanatory Notes (Chaucer 26). His occupation as a plowman is to dig for…
Memory: Impressions of Reality in Everyone Knows You Go Home
“I believe in memory not as a place of arrival, but as a point of departure—a catapult throwing you into present times, allowing you to imagine the future instead of accepting it.” – Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire Written works in the genres of autobiography, memoir, autobiographical narrative, and even historical narrations (like Eduardo Galeano’s…
After Reading a Letter
if you want to have a father you must first be a daughter she said you are a self-serving daughter you have forgotten how to be a daughter, he has convictions she said you have desires desires but not convictions, you have built walls she said hard walls cold hard impenetrable heart contemptible mean vicious…
Reckoning
“Have you reckon’d the earth much?” – Walt Whitman I used to lay in the grasswaiting for bugs to traverse my limbsto feel their tiny rapid treadon my skinlift my head andcount the stripes on their backsthe dots on their underbelliescatch their gaze for a moment—perhaps it was to feel,to venture I belonged in their…
Grasshopper
A grasshopper stole my sweater this morning. Today, I suppose, he needed it more than I. He dug his toes into the fabric. I shook it; I tried to transfer him to a stick. But he held on. So I hung the sweater on the rail just outside the back door, the one under the…
Weight
let the water consumelet my body sink beneath its weightuntil it dissolves behindthe tile, the faucet, the flickering lightlet the room, the world I inhabitbe everythingand all else dissipate with the ripples I makedipping my limbsinto the invisible filmlet the surface be still above meand let me be as the surfaceas the space that holds…
Yearning for the Feminine in The Boy Kings of Texas
In the prologue of his memoir, The Boy Kings of Texas, Domingo Martinez presents a song that, in his opinion, encapsulates the “emotional DNA of the boarder male,” explaining that this “DNA” was present not merely in his father and other male figures of his youth, but also in his grandmother—and as the story unfolds,…
A Simple Text
careful am I with words but quicker they seem to be with thoughtsthat come to themreadypacked with a punchlaced with somethingboldwhile I sip waterin the minutesthat lengthen with each keystrokeand backspacethey send insight instantlyto the skywhere I’ve beenlingeringbusy for hourspiecing wordstogether block by blockwhen I ought to havefinished at least somethingnothing remainsthe bottomlineuntil I emerge…