The decision had been made the night before, though I’d played very little part in it. We’d been lying in bed and she’d said it had to be done. And because the day had been long and we were tired and a bit drunk, I thought it might not stick, and hoped it wouldn’t. It…
“There is a high risk of losses of lambs and sheep exposed to these conditions.”—Bureau of Meteorology, Western Australia “Cold pastoral!”—Keats I have done two drawings: one of sheepwith lambs on a hillside near the old colonialmansion between here and town, and anotherof sheep dying with their dying lambson the same hillside in bad weather….
My twin’s bomb was packed with glass and a virus. His skin grew wet and dark and wouldn’t heal. I stink like meat, he wrote when he could. When it was clear he wasn’t dying, the VA doctors called him a cosmetic fix. Skin grafts, reconstructive surgery. When he recovered enough to make jokes, he…
Summer is entered through screen doors,and therefore seems unclearat first sight, when it is in facta mesh of fine wiressuspended panewisewhose haze has confused the eyes… What if we never entered then—what if the days remained like this,a hesitation at the threshold of itself,expectant, tense, tensileas lines that crisscross each otherin a space forever latentwhere…
I was as true as the numbers it takesto make a fever, and even if Julywas a slow-burning ship, I could stillfind comfort in the scattered spectrumof wind chimes and sun catchers. But now the skyline lies in hangdogsilence. Winter is a heavy opal claspedaround my neck, and the city skulkssilver-haired and ornery, and oh—…
Like a salty sailor, my son cusses his way out of bed and into themorning. Stubbed toe and no hot water, Mother Teresa. Burnt bagel,Mother Teresa. What a devious bride of Christ, orchestrating my son’sfailures from the other side. She who blessed Calcutta lepers makeshim run a stop sign bang in front of a cop….
Seven, maybe eight years old, nude, and outOf nowhere there she wasStreaked from the waist down in glisteningPebbled green shit, shivering as she ate a tube of cherry lip GlossIn the Great Ape House at the Lincoln Park Zoo.My wife was the first to see her—Her hand flying to her mouth.A man in overalls, a…
I. “Who is Susan Glaspell?” That was the question The New York Times asked in half-inch type in May 1918. At the time, Susan Glaspell’s star was ascendant. Her name was already well known in the New York theater world for the one-act plays she had written for the Provincetown Players, the little theater she…
In my parents’ day, they called lovers flames,and I’d try to imagine this literally.I remember a girl asking if I wanted to make love,which I thought then meant sweet talk:You are breathtaking.My first loves were older; they took the top,their hair fell and swept my face.I felt their heat as if at any momentThey’d flood…
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