“as if more than mortality brightened the air, like a girl tanning on a rock alone” —Derek Walcott Weighing less than a bead of perspiration, a mayfly alights on her breasts as if she’s chosen to wear the identity that’s chosen her in this heat where the borders of beauty evaporate along with the past….
Despite the electric gate to the driveway, it wouldn’t be hard to get inside the house. It’s white, with a matching fire escape, a pool-ladder leading up to the second-floor porch. I’d just have to be careful scaling the spikes on the five-foot wrought iron fence, move stealthily through the manicured shrubbery, past the rubber…
The Scheherazades played bridge every Thursday afternoon. Probably there were reasons for this as the ladies in the group might, on occasion, attest. The sea was there before them, its meaning immeasurable. After a twelfth trick, the one most beautiful surprised by confessing there had been no ”relations” for six years. Some nervous laughter, of…
Two doors down the neighbor kid hung a white wire reindeer with twinkle lights from a tree as if freshly shot and ready for butchery. It’s pleasing to live so near the country, the trees, the rolling hills and apple stands. But it does mean you have to put up with gun shots into the…
“These cliffs must have many secrets.” It is a sentence that has floated, fully formed, in and out of my thoughts since I arrived in Ireland. Now I say the words aloud for the first time. Breda Roche’s expression sharpens. “That, they do.” Her gaze on the winding street ahead of our car is grave….
All the positions are filled, the pastor said, but you could be a floater. Meaning I woke each morning not knowing and at breakfast a man named Archer told me what to get busy with. On Monday I hunched in the kitchen scrubbing beets. On Tuesday I helped the carpenters dismantle a barn’s gable. Weeks…
all at once you are inside & outside & closer to god I like the balcony best when it’s raining over the railing vertical garden strawberry strawberry if I wanted to shout at the masses in all manner of witness I would bend over this balcony light as my sniper’s bullet & fill my fists…
in the shelter of pine boughs the needles patterning our skin. What we did under the tree or what we tried to do, or what was done, what we told ourselves when we were home lying in our bunks at night while the neighborhood receded and shadows clawed at the windowpanes. Some days, the cones…
He said the sky is not blue or white or gray. It is the color of one septillion snowflakes falling to the ground. He said a septillion is one followed by twenty-four zeros. More zeros than you could ever write down in one sitting because you are an impatient child. An only child. A singularity,…
No products in the cart.