The Collected Essays, Stories, and Poetry of Kathleen Raygoza
When the new lottery machine pulled a twenty from my fingers, I knew I had made a mistake. My gone money was reincarnated as an electric-green balance. “I don’t know anything about that machine,” said the woman at the counter, “but I don’t think it makes change. You’ll have to play all twenty dollars.” My […]
MoreYour Jesus who dons a red cap and brandishes the American flag on the steps of an earthen fortress to demand the restoration of God’s nation is not my Jesus. Your Jesus cover boy of your eleventh hour attempt to wake sleepers dead to the demise of God’s chosen democracy is not my Jesus. Your […]
MoreIn his characteristic all-caps print, and with precise lines and arrows, Michael scrawled a crude map on the back of a Glacier Bank envelope. With the pen tip he pointed. “Just take the Skyland Access Road, clock about nine miles, and you’ll see us a little past Challenge Cabin,” he said. Zach asked, “won’t Cassie […]
MoreThe way was dark, the road winding. We lost elevation and the rolling Black Hills like ocean waves broke on the Great Plains, spilling out near-flat beneath a volatile sky. Electric air buzzed white, then the world went black again. The Buck Moon illuminated fence posts and barbed wire. Sometimes stars glinted as the calmer […]
MoreWith his back to our cubed mess of belongings, Zach lowered the UHaul door and secured our household goods with the combination lock from my Flathead High School days. I pitied any fool desperate enough to unlock and simultaneously unleash 12,000 pounds worth of stuff. “We won’t need to check if anything’s shifted. That’s for […]
MoreMontgomery, Alabama is haunted. By lonesome whippoorwills among the whisperings and the camellias and the pines. Steepled shadows on Dexter Avenue and the cold bronze likeness of the little woman who started it all. On her corner she stands no tired bone in her body, demurely resistant. Hank by the Riverboat emulates the blue spirit […]
MoreI look back now and see the lesson unfurl like some faded map. For a girl wired to plot and plan and see the thing through to the exhausted end, weeks of no move date and a route still to-be-determined primed me for one of two possible responses: to rise, or stumble again through a […]
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Life Out Here 