Jane Mead

The kids are shrieking at the edge of the pool, their angelic faces twisting. They like to shriek—they like to make the Great Dane bellow. When he cannot stand it any longer, he jumps the wall and chases them, still screaming, in. And under all thi [...]

at Berkeley is reading English pastoral poetry with passive abandon, chewing his thumbnail aggressively. He wants to see grass, he wants to BE grass so badly he can almost smell it. Outside, they are cutting the grass— the man and the mower—they [...]

Jesus, I am cruelly lonely and I do not know what I have done nor do I suspect that you will answer me. And, what is more, I have spent these bare months bargaining with my soul as if I could make her promise to love me when now it seems that what I [...]

I know the things I know: my father's flesh will not keep him warm much longer. He cannot say why he hates it. The worms are working their way to his heart. Every day there are more of them inside him. They enter his white arms and leave their red tr [...]

It seems wrong— the way the body refuses to die, the way the soul refuses to be stronger. Wrong—that the memory I cannot fully form will never fully leave me, the memory of a man who tried to save me: vague curve of shoulders and back disappearin [...]