Writing

Novels

Great Divide
from Unsolicited Press

"In your dream it had been dismantled piece by piece by mice or creatures that looked like mice but were really white balls of negative space or static that looked more like cotton than like mice."

Stories

The Claw
Published in The Iowa Review

“Baby,” he said, “I’m not really here for the bears.”

On the House
Published in Vol.1 Brooklyn

“Mark was behind the counter at Java Time that day, which pleased no one…”

Mephistopheles
Published in X-R-A-Y

“Sometimes, when Meph followed her into the bathroom to lace himself between her legs while she peed, Alan would shake his head from the bedroom, saying, ‘You know that cat’s a pervert, right?’”

Other Bodies
Published in pigeonholes

“Since getting pregnant she craves champagne and oysters and dreams about riding horses.”

My Grandmother in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 1943 When They Were Building an Atomic Bomb
Published in New Flash Fiction Review

“Lucy arrived into a city of clattering. Metal on metal on packed dirt on rail ties on muddy standing water on boardwalks on cement on flesh on leather on canvas on metal on metal on earth.” 

The Gods of Midwest Nice
published in Issue 99 of Quarterly West

"They didn’t choose the river, and this is what he got, then, for all his years of doing as he was told, a flash of bone-broken suffering and then a room full of old women nibbling on leftovers. "

The Old War
published in Issue 63 of American Short Fiction

"In my grandparents’ attic there is a ghost named Levi. He is an old general from an old war, and built the house a long time ago. We know he is there because he once woke my Aunt Sarah with a hand on her throat. She screamed and screamed and woke everyone in the house. She wasn’t harmed, but no--no, I wouldn’t say he is harmless."

First Words
published in Issue 20 of Coal Hill Review

"Watching the blast of the world’s first atomic bomb from a small hilltop in the New Mexico desert, J. Robert Oppenheimer exclaimed, 'It worked!'"

Country Dirt
published in Issue 20 of Coal Hill Review

"Childhood is a mortifying thing, best forgotten."

Herb Lore, Apprehensions, At the Trinity Atomic Test
published in Issue 22 of Eleven Eleven Journal

"But before that, something happened. Something happened again and again that was worse than what was to come."

Jean Tatlock Tryptych
published in Volume 13 of P-Queue

"What could one more go-round matter, with my fingers on the strings?"

Joan of Knoxville, 1945
published in Volume 4 of Cobalt

"They’d gotten a little silly, lounging around in the big armchairs and smoking cigarettes in a slow, languorous way that felt fancy and rich to them, and someone had started singing a ridiculous song in a low, jazzy voice, and for a bit Joan had wished that this was all there would be to the evening, this beginning."

Domestication
published in Volume 4 of Cobalt 

"Good horsemanship shares its methods with the governance of totalitarian regimes. You must expect inquiries about your strength, your ability to lead and to punish. There are other parts too—partnership and affection—but sometimes, when faced with another that could crush you, you have to posture up a bit. Bluff and bluster. You have to act tougher than you’d like, sometimes. Tougher                             than you are."

Excavations
published in Feburary 2016 in Conium Review

"In the news today was an article about a dog in Yuba City who dug up human bones in the backyard. There was a jaw bone and a skull. The police suspected religious rituals. My dog too has been digging."

World Peace Part I
published in Spring 2016 issue of The East Bay Review

"But she didn’t know if he’d gotten halfway to what he intended, or a quarter, didn’t know really, even, what it was he’d meant to do when he ran off to that little country halfway across the world."

Enola Gay
published in Summer 2015 issue of Blue Lyra Review

"The bomb does not know sorrow, but the look on the woman’s face is sorrow as she is singing, and the song is a sorrowful song about the little body that will not be soothed."

St. Anthony of Potrero
published in issue 17 of 580 Split

"Nothing is lost, but it is only fair to admit that, every now and again, something may become lost to you. Short-sighted concealment of difficult facts and objects is obtainable, within certain bounds—go to a place you do not know well, cover the thing with sticks and leaves or nudge it into a particularly dark afternoon shadow, walk away and never come to that spot again, even in dreams. It isn’t lost, but you’ve left it for someone else to find. In most cases, that will be me. I am a prodigious finder of the things you’ve left behind."

At the Manzanar War Relocation Center, 1945
published in issue 14 of Cobalt

"Every evening when the boys came into the barracks, they tracked the red dirt with them. It covered them like the fine hairs, like the silky down of animals."

Winners and Losers
published in ENTER>text: 3 years

"Sing us a song. One you remember from a long time ago."

Palinopsia
published in issue 3 of Unstuck

"You cannot look into the flash of an atomic bomb. This is one of the places where, for various reason, vision stops."

The Grand Tour
published in issue 5.1 of White Whale Review

"In the attic there was a ghost. We named him Levi. Aunt Sarah named him Levi on the night when she was a teenager and she awoke screaming, feeling that a hand had been touching her, a man's hand on her hair and her face and her throat."

Craig on Tinian Island, 1945
published in Spring 2013 issue of JMWW

"As they passed under the water the eyes closed, and this sent a reverberation through Craig that was not relief. He waited, watched as the lips parted and the mouth filled with brack. He resisted the limp-flailing arms that slapped at his chest, his shoulders, never reaching his face. He wondered how long it would take such a man to drown. He did not think it would be long."

Questing Beast
published in issue 5.1 of Redivider

"It barked once before it turned and ran—barked, because she had no other word for it, and not really once, but in a strange, reverberating chorus, a chaotic rumble like a hundred dogs barking, like a pack falling upon the fox: and there was that squealing in it too."

Eros + Thanatos
published in WINK Pinup

"She wasn't sure exactly how it had started; nothing particular was said, no agreements made, but as they had walked side by side around the city—the Met, Battery Park, St. John's, everything you're supposed to see—she had known that they were suddenly, intensely together, and each word had become a stitch, a little stab followed by a pulling closer."

Morning Dove
published in Red Sky

"As Miriam came to stand beside him, he turned to show her what he was holding, though he did not look at her: it was the body of a bird, its feathers standing out perfectly white against its tiny pink beak and orange feet. It was small and deflated looking, with its neck extended and laid against He's palm in a soft curve, an oddly inviting angle, like a beautiful virgin in an old movie."

Claudia on the Morning of the Trinity Atomic Test, 1945
published in decomP

"Along a dried riverbed she found a place where a cow had died. All around the scrubby grass was flattened, the stalks bent or torn, and she wondered if the animal had been thrashing. Her husband had told her how they starve, the old ones who can't eat, or the weak ones when the summer is so hot that the ground cracks and plants shrivel. He'd told her how they lie on the ground and paddle their legs, scoring dark marks into the earth, as if they could swim to the end of the world and pull themselves out of it. He'd told her this to frighten her, and had succeeded."

A Fable
published in Monkeybicycle

"One day my grandfather was out driving. This was after the war, after my grandparents were married and living in Pennsylvania with my aunt Sarah, before my father was born. As he was driving, he became sure that he had hit something back along the road behind him, so he turned around to check."

Hector at the Gates
published in issue 10 of The Collagist

"Time may forgive you for it, or forget you. Do not dream of monuments for sons of sons to marvel at, and perhaps the world will never dream of Gethsemane or Geronimo or Starbuck on the bridge."

Tabula Rasa
published in issue 1 of Cobalt

"I was born at the age of thirty-two with a Ph.D. in comparative religion. It happened in May, almost five years ago now, when a small blood clot that had been forming in the muscle of my calf unhooked itself from the wall of its blood vessel and went traveling."

An Evening with Dirty Jobs' Mike Rowe
published in Summer 2010 issue of The Writing Disorder

"But he knows that if he touches her now he will later remember the path his hands took, and he will think of it every time he looks at her body—the invisible, ineradicable snail-trails he's drawn onto her cleanliness."

Last Dance at Poplar Ridge
published in issue 5 of Pank

"For my own part, I just worried that they'd be lonely—heaven is full of old people and babies and doesn't offer much for teenage girls. I imagine them, listless and awkward in their wrinkling gowns, stuck with each other, and no one else dressed up."

Monster
published in Dark Sky

"I do not know what would have happened if Mike had ever been fast enough to tag us (if it could, after so long, have been as gentle as that). Perhaps we would have become the monsters and he would have become one of us and the sweethearts would have poured out of him onto the grass or leapt up from the ground to swarm us. Or perhaps the game would have ended."

The Inland Seas
published in issue 2 of Amor Fati

"The facts are widely known: On September 25th, 1998, a rain storm started in Western Massachusetts. The rain, while heavy at times, was not unseasonable, and outside of a higher than average number of traffic accidents, local news stations reported nothing out of the ordinary that evening."

Interviews and Reviews