The Architect
loved the Mobius, and the sky’s big suggestion of a universe, and now and then would imagine a heaven as if it were his to construct and manage, death just a pause before the real work would begin. In truth, and in his…
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Frequently Asked Questions: 7
Is it difficult to get away from it all once you’ve had a child? I am swaying in the galley—working to appease this infant who is not fussing but will be fussing if I don’t move— when a black steward enters the…
The Lives of My Friends
The sun may be bright but it is not clear To me why I feel as I do, feeling my way Along the shadowy sidewalks that show No traces of the footprints that should Have worn the concrete down to earth, No hard evidence of the lives of my friends Or scrap of fabric upon…
Shooting Dogs
Do you remember when we were standing around the park waiting for something cool to happen and that friend of ours walked up to a very orange cat and kicked it into the sky like a soccer ball, like the exact opposite of what the animal was, and how it seemed to stay in the…
Babushkas
Stalin’s genocide might never have happened in Pripyat, just outside Chernobyl, where soldiers told her father who asked to keep a few potatoes, Your soul will fly away and we’ll wrap your guts around the phone wires. Her family nearly killed and ate her. Then came the Germans— posing in lederhosen on the…
The Middlegame
Tuesday I’m trying to figure out if you can have two thoughts at once. I mean really think about two things simultaneously, not like be hungry and do math at the same time, which is what I was doing when I originally started wondering in the first place. Focus is my Achilles’ heel. Eric figured…
How It Was
When he came back he wanted it all to have been the whiff of Gitanes, Place du Tertre silhouettes, carnets de billets, and the Clignancourt jazzers but in truth it was neither the city nor the heart-stopping Hovercraft ride but the long dark night of the North, the Artois, and L’Île de France, where they’d…
A Wild Tom Turkey
When he’s in the yard he’s hard to find not like when he stands in the stubble across the road brewing his voice with deeper and deeper percolations of what sounds like, “I’ll fuck anything in feathers,” stopping now and then to display his fan and perform a wobbly polka, chest heavy as he breasts…
To Wait and Not Yearn for the Waiting to End
The day’s wait over, empty-handed, I head for the truck. Some hunting days are like this, big sky showing itself off, blue down through purple to orange, salmon clouds. I’m recalling the lichen-shagged dead maple snag I stared at for an hour from my tree stand, green and gray and white starbursts, feathery at the…