Don’t talk about rehab and sobriety all the time. Don’t talk about your cats too much. No one wants to hear about your blackouts. No one wants to hear about the psychiatric hospital, either. Take a shower every day. Every other day will probably do. Don’t cast spells in public. Drive your car. Don’t use […]

The voyage was long, so long. Disease made us panic. Someone was thrown from the steamship deck  into the blue-black sea — it was me. I sank down, down. I saw skeletons and hulls of clipper ships half-buried on the ocean floor.  I struggled to swim. I flailed.  Then I saw you — an unexpected […]

I sewed a shirt about my life from red silk, with buttons of ice. It looked sexy and stylish and smashing, but it gave me a bad case of lice. I baked a cake about my life with absinthe and chocolate ganache. Crushed glass was one ingredient too much, though. My confection went out with […]

My panting dogs didn’t plunge into the pond with their customary gusto. They hovered at the edge, and cautiously sipped. As I walked closer, I saw the reason— a dead porcupine floating on his side. His exposed backbone and ribcage were a crown for a demented woods goddess, the key to a lost language, a […]