Jendi Reiter

Loudly, at the League of Women Voters book sale, my sixth-grade son asks me “Have you ever wanted to commit suicide?” His four moods are silly, angry, hungry, and asleep. A battered copy of the DC Comics series lies between Donald Duck and a graphic memoir of Palestine on the genre-sorted table in the vocational

  On the afternoon I come home from surgery, I converse with a giant snake. * On an evening six years before surgery, I am teaching a poorly-attended church group about Jungian theology. The wounded healer. Chiron the centaur. How to lie in the cave of Asklepius, on the couch from which clinic gets its

in the late summer of a state on fire they prepared for my birth with buttercream guns or glitter, in the streets where kneeling on necks the blue horsemen snuffed another dark breath they drove, masked, to the mall for plastic feet to spear into frosting, in the dry wind they dreamed of lures or

A feathered lady of a certain age grows spurs one morning, learns to crow where once she only chuckled, head-down, over corn and chicks. She hasn’t laid in months but her human is kind, touched by thinking of her first new egg that the baby rolled in wonder, the memory warmer than the stew her

“I am going to this wedding,” Zebatinsky declared to Carla. His middling daughter. Middle. But the switched word lodged in his brain, as happened more and more these days, branching out tendrils of other words, a not unpleasant process until he was obliged to backtrack its meanderings to the conversation he’d left hanging. Carla in

There is a father with my face

in my first city, his girl not me

not the turn to gold but touch he

wanted most