My nervous stomach always makes it hard to **** during a vacation. This isn’t MY toilet. After two weeks of self-inflicted constipation in my friend’s cousin’s tiny pueblo, I couldn’t hold it anymore.

I took a huuuuuuuuuge dump. To my horror, it was so huge it wouldn’t flush. Oh God no.

I smuggled a grocery bag into the bathroom and put it over my hand as a glove to pinch the link into smaller sections. Flush *******! Even the pieces wouldn’t go down. I pulled them out with the bag and threw it in the trash can outside as fast as I could.

I kept waiting, horrified, for the trash truck to come please don’t discover my **** in there please don’t discover my **** in there until the day the trash can got full.

In these little pueblos, what I didn’t know is that there is no trash truck. They burn their trash. My **** was in there.

They burned my ****.

Warm air from the summer night blasts through the open windows.
I don’t know where we’re going.
I don’t think he knows either.
"Just drive," he says.

So I do.

The clock is ticking. You're trying desperately to explain something and you don't have enough time.

End the story wondering...

Their house was

Pressing your nose into the crackling spine of an ancient novel –
Coarse pages and the small warmth of unraveling vanilla.
Nostalgia.

But there was another smell too, around the edges.
One that made it a different story.

A smell like rotten apples  hidden somewhere years before
And forgotten.
A heart-sinking, suspicious nostalgia.

She gained ten pounds of muscle the summer she worked in Alaska.
She’d have that slight tone for the rest of her life –  
a glimmer when she flexed to stock shelves at Vons the next year or to take a turkey out of the oven or to climb a ladder or to carry her sleeping daughter fifteen years later.
A flashing tight tendril of muscle in her triceps.

pulsing, teeming,
breathing meaning

into



me

Lord, tell me how each snip of snow
that melds into the glass
can tip-toe by your ear and drum
a low sigh on your lap.

It waltzes to the cracking roof
that guards a drafting barn
where you lay two thousand years before
in mottled swathes of yarn.

A brush against a splintered beam
will splotch its frozen cape
with drops of ruby warmth that blot
the mold of every flake.

Lord, show me how your full, rich blood
can thaw a heart stung stiff
and craft a child all your own
held strong in mercy’s lift.