Gulf Stream MagazineVisual art by María DeGuzmán Somewhere in a winter that’s barely a winter my friends down south are promising each other nothing. What is warm, what is heating my life here is what’s long been kept so close. The years aren’t really measurable. Or maybe there are only miles. I’ve […]
One my grandpa used to swim through on so many boozy evenings when the rockabilly band played. When Patsy Cline crooned for locals. When as a teenager Patsy stepped down from the stage to find my grandpa’s helping hand and in the back, alone, my grandma’s jealous gaze could split the whole place in […]
after Max Ritvo and Claire Yoo Virginia, I think God is in your moving. As you go from room to room, you trace holy lines like streaks of neon, so bright my teeth ache. Sometimes when you leave a place, it’s like you’ve siphoned all the grace from […]
Lie often. When she thinks you’re her sister Pauline, talk about growing up on the family farm: jumping from the hayloft, that unheated bedroom. About the trip to Atlantic City where you rode bikes on the boardwalk, boys you kissed behind the roller skating rink, the years you worked together in the war factory. […]
Visual art by Renée Cohen Hot pink and lonely amidst road grime and weeds—a child’s stuffed whale along the freeway, tossed one day as a lesson in regret and wonder. There now under sun and rain and wind and heightened by its candid placement, like a lone shoe in […]
Turns out, it wasn’t a ghost tapping I’m still here in Morse Code at the window the whole long morning you spent pretending the day ahead might deliver something to cleave the weight in your chest, even though nothing but a rapture would do. You’ve been tired for days. You’ve got lots of excuses […]
In morning darkness I pull over and watch the heavy equipment sleeping behind barbed wire. How yellow and massive they appear under globes of halogen night lights. How strong their names: Bulldozer. Excavator. Knuckleboom loader. Feller buncher. Backhoe. Row upon row, the peaceful dreams of machines. The eastern sky glows orange. Soon I will drive […]
1 I am scared to be the oldest of us. When you were born I sat in the hospital, waiting, or slept and dreamt of your new names. I heard you speak your first words; one of you pointed at the chandelier above the dining room table and whispered pretty lights. […]
Neon Tetras, Tiger Barbs, and Rainbow Sharks swim round and round through seaweed and ferns, over moss and ornaments nestled in the coral and lava rock of the aquarium Nancy Reagan has placed in her husband’s study. Deep in dementia, the President watches from an armchair and fixates on a miniature […]
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