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Compact Jazz recording, 1989Nina Simone, accompanying herself on piano Every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer.—Gaston Bachelard In 1980, my mother lay dying. Her death that July guided me north to a high Victorian mansion in upstate New York and, within just three days, to my beloved. He too was mourning—his marriage …

Would you make love to me if I had two heads?I promise it’ll be fun, a two-for-the-price-of-one big-box-department-store-weekly-special:Just add water! And my extra head magically sprouts out of my neck, birthing quicker than the Chia PetI was dying to bring home back in the nineties, with a grocery cart full and checkout-stand tabloids and scandaland …

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I needed money after the move. That was my excuse. But really I couldn’t bear to live in another house with it, knowing it was in the side table, in the drawer above my vibrator. Unfired for years—so much potential. The inheritance came with a small box of bullets, the cardboard foxed but nearly full, …

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They come back to you as a signwhen someone dies, they say, a dragonfly,some dull moth skimming a mud puddle,a hummingbird in the ditch’s goldenrod.But what if they are alive? But not allowedto live? How do they return, then? Cricketunder the sink for three nights straight.Why do we call it a song? That scraping,that needy …

We once drove 900 miles—from California to Idaho—in a borrowed car, the dead-drench of summerslicking our skin with its own salt, to witnessan eclipse’s totality. The darkened sun, the skypunched through. We barely made it, but didon duct tape & faith. Bear with me. I know how easyit is to forget a journey for all …

A great many orchids, the endangered lady’s slipper for one, expend a portion of their energy creating pseudobulbs where they host ant colonies, because the formic acid ants spit at intruders gives the soil a pleasingly bitter pH. This is an example of myrmecophilia, a way of being in a love relationship with ants. Though …