recent selected publications
short stories (longer fiction)
I looked at Kellie like, what the fuck are you talking about?
“When you were still sleeping,” she said. “I heard a guy outside say to someone, ‘Five days to the next dance fest!’”
I’d heard her the first time, but it sounded funny. It was that phrase…
“Why would you do that, question mark exclamation point.”
Kelly did that sometimes—she speech-to-texted so often that sometimes it slipped into her regular speech. Comma, period, lol, question mark. Open quote, unquote, when retelling a story about something stupid one of her coworkers or friends said…
We were somewhere around Italy, almost halfway around the world, when the drinks began to kick in.
I’d actually felt it right away, the brain freeze and beginnings of drunkenness hitting together as soon as we’d started drinking frozen margaritas in Mexico. Because it was hot as shit…
Pilot went first. First because it was his family’s cabin, first because he was going to show us proper form, how to do it. First because he always went first.
The bulkhead was maybe five feet tall, but we could still see a good two feet of above the water. The tide had come in but…
I was fidgeting with my beer—passing it from one hand to the other and back again, the little I’d spilled giving it just enough slide across the bar to feel satisfying—when Walt walked in.
“This place is dead anyway!”…
It was Sunday and I wasn’t expecting the window crew until Monday. I opened up my kitchen door and all the ground and earth around my house was dug up, caved in, eroding downward, and crumbling from water erosion. There was a whole work crew out there with backhoes and diggers and hardhats and such. Pools of muck and water and mud…
short-shorts (cnf)
How, when we’d return to California to visit family in the summers, my dad would drive us around on little nostalgia tours — that’s where I went to high school, this was the strip we’d cruise on the weekends, that used to be our favorite burger joint…
Two weeks ago, I planted seeds for four different bonsai trees. Pinus Aristata, Delonix Regia, Jacaranda Mimosifolia, Picea Abies North America.
Two weeks before that—exactly one month ago today, as I write this…
Nearly every time I go home, my dad mentions the knife I gave him. A filet knife given for birthday or Christmas or Father’s Day. I was proud of the gift at the time, how he used it on the very next fishing trip we went on together, and am proud of it now…
Rest Stops and Parking Lots**
X-RAY, December 2020
**selected for Best Small Fictions 2021
Because I didn’t want to pay for a hotel.1 Because I could afford to pay for a hotel, but it seemed like a waste.2 Because, as much as I enjoy sleeping in and then being lazy and watching TV in bed3, I wanted to get up and moving and on the road as soon as possible.4 …
I want to say it reminds me of growing up in Washington, which it does, a little, much more than the Michigan and Illinois where I’ve now spent most of my adult life, but also because reminds me of growing up is one of my favorite things to say. Growing up…
The first time someone tells you they don’t have those, you’re more confused than anything. Too confused to ask anything in reply, too surprised to think of any questions to ask. At this point, it is still just confusion. Confusion and disappointment. Complaint as you sit…
I never received one either, not that I remember, though I had a collection of blank tapes and songs recorded onto them, each with its own handwritten label. Maxwell and Memorex, and TDK; 60 minutes, 90 minutes, 120…
You Think About That Or
You’re staring at the wall of books. You want to leave them all…
Something About Patterns or Habits or Grooves
I get on the wrong bus. It’s been a long day, I’m tired. And it’s cold…
Did you grow up near water? What did you think of when I asked that—lake, river, ocean, pool, other? Do you like to swim? Do you remember learning how? Did your grandmother live not on a lake, but near? Walking distance? Do you have fond memories…
My grandfather gave me a set of monogrammed handkerchiefs for Christmas—I didn’t know what to make of the present, but I loved it. I was six, seven, eight years old. One of those ages from when my memories themselves are clear but unanchored to time…
My students are working in groups and I’m standing in the front corner of the room, overseeing and keeping them on track, trying to intuit if and when they have questions but don’t want to speak up or even raise their hands, but then I look out the window…
I’m as old now as my dad was when he dunked me underwater in the baptism font at our local Mormon ward, baptizing me into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints… “I was today years old…” people say on Twitter, when tweeting about something…
When I was growing up, the town I lived in was incorporated into a city. Our small piece of a larger whole became a whole unto its own, but I didn’t really know what any of that meant. I was 17, 18 years old. We got our own fire department, police department…
A warning banner along the top of my email tells me “you’re out of storage space and will soon be unable to send or receive emails until you free up space or purchase additional storage,” and although I like the idea of not being able to receive any more emails, the freedom of it, the actual idea of not being able to send or receive any more emails is… I wouldn’t say it terrifies me, but I wouldn’t not say it…
short shorts (fiction)
When the cloud cover breaks, I am going to jump in the creek.
When it stops raining, I’m jumping in.
I don’t want to already be wet before getting wet, is the thing. …
There was the guy who held a knife over a flame and then cut-slash-burned his girlfriend’s name into his bicep. The girl who got her tongue pierced but then took out the piercing later that same night…
That reminds me. That was the year I sat in front of the mirror every day, answering questions, interviewing myself. Practicing. Preparing for the inevitable, though the inevitability of what, I wasn’t…
I wanted an afternoon coffee—which I never do, it’ll keep me up at night, I probably could have gotten away when it when I was younger, but I’m not younger anymore, and I didn’t drink coffee when I was, anyway…
One of the first times I told her, I used the word aperture. I said it kinda looked like, or at least reminded me of, the old camera that my grandfather gave me the year I got into photography. I have since self-corrected, I’ve told her I don’t think it’s quite like that after all…
poetry
You wake up and have no idea
where you are. You’re in a room
you’ve never been in before.
You get up and open the door,…
essays
Is this a good idea?” I keep saying. Over and over: “Is this a good idea? Is this a good idea? Is this a good idea? Isthisagoodidea?” To Matt, though I’m not really asking; to myself, like I’m trying to cast a spell, pushing myself into action; to the deer, like it might understand this mantra as coming from someone who wants to help…
On Pop Music & Growing Up
(essays from a manuscript-in-progress)
I see the shirt from afar, like the midway full of people parted just for my sightline. BLEED THE FREAK, it says in big, blocky, bright red letters. I’m not sure what it means, but it doesn’t feel right. Something about the violence of the phrase, the awkward but hypnotic syntax. The words worm their way into my brain like a song, bleed the freak, bleed the freak, bleed the freak…
I’m pacing around the kitchen, tethered to our phone attached to the wall by way of a cord that’s long enough to allow me walk all around the tiny room but not so long as to allow me to wander into any kind of privacy. My mom is looking at me, wondering what’s so important to have gotten a call so late. It’s after ten, a school night. My parents already made me turn off my TV, tucked me in…
Near the beginning of Nine Inch Nails’ cover of Adam and the Ants’ “Physical (You’re So),” as the guitars are still feeding back, having not yet crunched their way into riff, Trent Reznor whispers something barely audible. You can really only hear it if you know it’s there. If you’re listening for it. If you’ve got your speakers turned all the way up, or maybe if you’re listening to it with headphones…