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The Telephone Mode

I find talking on the phone to be one of the purest forms of communication. You are receiving the person’s voice, their tone, their laughter, without the distraction of their clothing, their hairdo, their body. I don’t care what someone looks like. I want to hear them sigh with exhaustion or cackle with delight. I want to hear tiny details of the environment from which they speak: birdsong, barking dogs, the beep of a microwave.

Butter

I went on absorbing Beth’s hostile digs until a new patient stole her attention from me. Louise had a round face, dark curly hair, and a generous, pear-shaped body. Her weight seemed concentrated in her thighs. When she arrived at lunch for the first time, her figure filling the doorframe, Beth’s eyes brightened as if she were an African lion coming upon a gazelle. I could practically feel my tormentor’s focus lift off me.

Driving Upstate with My Father

Driving upstate with my father / at the end of a bad year. Trees begin / to outnumber houses. Rain turns to snow / as fields hang like paintings. / Dad fills his lip with chew, talks.

Flower People

There was a rumor the NAACP would call for a boycott of white-owned businesses. Eugene’s mother said it wasn’t clear what the objective would be, except to piss off white people and make Black people feel in control of something. “A show of Black power,” she said, holding up a fist from the living-room sofa, but she was worried more people would be killed.

Past Futures

billy woods on the Cycles and Patterns of Human History

It just takes the right person, at the right time, to light the right spark and make what previously would have seemed impossible the law of the land. When I was a child, Somalia had a government. They might not have one again for the rest of my life.

The Basement

Teenage parties, lost treasures, wartime bomb shelters

The Next Peak

The mountain in winter enables the kind of sleep that restores, heals, allows brains to solve problems. The days have more than enough darkness to crawl inside.

still lives

The omen comes in the ruin of a robin’s egg on the sidewalk: fractured blue splattered with the pink makings of a flightless thing. A plum membrane of skin stretched over eyes like bruises. I make the mistake of looking back at this small disaster, and then the calamity of it fingers the threads of my morning.