Category: Uncategorized
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to the woman who inherited my mom’s phone number
That’s something the hospice nurses never warned us about: between all their murmurs of responses are unpredictable and make sure you’re taking care of yourselves too and I’m guessing less than a week now, it must have slipped their minds to mention that sometimes, in the aftermath, you just…forget. Read more
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Picture Frames
A short while ago, as I sought solace in Mom’s old notebooks—filled with lists of To Dos, unfamiliar names, numbers, dates to be remembered, quotes that must have kindled some delight deep inside her—my gaze paused on Picture Frames, scribbled in a margin. This need for frames surely arose one October, just after my sister…
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Wake
For Anna As the crow’s caw rings silence across birch bowed low with ice and snow, we echo a carrion’s emptiness. Restless fingers pick imagined lint off black dresses that are iron-pressed like crisp winter. Our polished shoes blur, the ice we weep shattering around our half-thawed feet. We echo emptiness, the walls, windows, barren…
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Upon Pulling Icarus from the Water and Finding, to Your Profound Relief, that He Still Has a Pulse
Icarus is a scrappy sort, so when he wakes up after the crash, swollen eyes blinking slow and owlish against the hospital’s harsh fluorescent light, the first thing he tells you is that he wants to buy a candle that smells like space. Read more
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Stick Figures
What, I wondered, was the appropriate design for a situation like mine? Colorful circles, bumping up against one another in random patterns like marbles tossed across a floor? Shadows of birds balanced on a wire, twittering quarter and eighth notes that trailed in a wispy string above their heads? The tidy, monochromatic lineup of trees,…
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Things I Might Say to Spider-Man if He Ever Rescues Me from a Mugger
Do you mind if I ask, now that I’m thinking of it: In 1962, when you were nothing more than a chip of graphite trapped inside a spare pencil lying on Steve Ditko’s desk, did you know? As you whispered affirmations of your existence, hoping he might hear you—might release you from your No. 2…
Sara Solberg 