The Moon Sweats Silver And We Carry It On Our Backs. Five Chapters.

"The mountain was their mother. She chewed the sunlight and spit it out between her teeth like coca. Her mouths were made of dirt. Her tits were full of silver. She had killed a thousand men, maybe more. The sun looked at her like a man looks at a woman, fierce and hungry. The light was strong on her slopes and it could crisp a man’s scalp where his hair had thinned."

The Relapse. the L Magazine.

"From her first meeting, Claudia sensed she would relapse and that it would be with Jack. She sensed these things before she even knew his name, which she learned when he walked to the podium to get his white chip. He looked like a cross between a revolutionary and a sick man, with pale skin and a dark, neatly clipped moustache. His lower lip was pierced, but from across the room his gold stud was dull and misplaced as a crumb. A tattoo crawled out from under the sleeve of his T-shirt like a shy animal. She couldn't quite pick it out: a question mark? A snake?"

Quiet Men. A Public Space.

“I ran my tongue against the streaks of red dripping down
the fridge to taste the wine he’d drunk. I stayed awake until
morning."

You can also find “Quiet Men” anthologized here, or translated into Spanish here.

In Defense of Saccharine. Black Warrior Review.

“Saccharine is our sweetest word for fear: the fear of too much sentiment, too much taste. When we hear saccharine, we think of language that has shamed us, netted our hearts in trite articulations: words repeated too many times for cheap effect, recycled ad nauseam. Ad nauseam: We are glutted with sweet to the point of sickness.”

You can find Jezebel’s response to the essay here.

The Wintering Barn.  Burnside Review.

“There was a bonfire at the foot of the castle that night. The savants had these fires because we wanted to prove, mainly to ourselves, we had a reason to be in Egypt at all. We showed each other the fruits of our various studies—sketches of ruins, ledgers of the ancient symbols—and dissolved our fear with flasks of Egyptian wine.”

Morphology of the Hit. A Public Space.

I liked the kids. They touched me--literally my arms, legs, my whole body--more than anyone else I'd known. I knew their families by sight and sometimes by name. Many of their mothers sold chewing gum and cashews in the parque central next to the bus station. Their fathers and brothers called out "Guapa chica!" every time I passed. I should have been offended. I wasn't.