It arises as a memory cloaked in vapor. Like all dreams do, surrounded by gasoline mist and the smell of tires in the August heat. The chainsaw scream of the two stroke mixes with the peals of childhood delight, as they lay righteous go-kart rubber. Soft-serve chocolate swirl dipped in Magic Shell for the victor. This hiraeth on…

It came as a fever in the blood, so long ago none remember the origin. Like chicken pox, a quick virus touch and then over. Another childhood rite of passage, like baby teeth, like eyes from blue to brown. After the fire of the fever they cool, the skin pales, the…

Of course it makes sense that the retards would be in love because like seeks like. And I still hear the low murmurs as she got on the yellow school bus with her brother, matched with the groan of the engine as it geared into life dragging us up Scribner Hill Road and to…

I live in a land of borders, and the boundaries of my fiefdom, my medieval Brunswick, the Methamphetamine Kingdom, this sovereign land, is the Radley-Swett Line. A Frostian unmended stone wall, and, every evening, I walk the wall with the sigil of this Kingdom, my sentinel dog, Radley. …

I never saw any children there, just the two of them already old when I was young, a sliver of wood smoke from a chimney in winter, and in the summer a collection of farming artifacts, car parts, windows, screen doors tires and rotting pallets. The hoarded ephemera of a life close to the edge…

In the place they called Augusta General in 1973, birth defects had to be profound to be noticed. Humpbacked Mongoloids, Thalidomide Flipper Men, but I slipped by, quietly ginger, with my soul born on the outside. Rusty and delicate as ginger skin, my soul is, fair to contrast my hair’s pale fire. Science has told me…

Privilege doesn’t look both ways when it crosses the crosswalk, but you do. Fitfully turning one way and then the next, double checking your baffles before you cross from Hawthorne-Longfellow Library to the Tower. Bundled against the cold, cheap scarf and knock-off pea coat, Walmart shoes just below the cuffs of your Marden’s…