In old age, long after his retirement from the engineering faculty at Syracuse University, my father, Harry Gruenberg, began to have flashbacks about his life in Vienna before he escaped in 1939. He also had recurring nightmares about being buried alive. I realize now the dream was triggered by his discovery of the details of…
It was too late when I was called in, but it was probably always too late, which is to say there was really never any hope. People didn’t want to believe that—even some of the people who were closest to Beth, maybe them most of all. They would ask me for a long time after…
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboatcomes slowly out and then goes back is truly worthall the years of sorrow that are to come. —Jack Gilbert, “A Brief for the Defense” I’m here, listening to the sound of oarsdipping and dripping while they pull across the sound,and, it’s true,…
I am successfully cupping fireflies with my make believe hand.I am admiring the invisible irises I forgot to plant last November.I actually see the tie-dye evolution of autumn leaves for the first time My son said after we left the hospice where my mother would beA ghost before we ever saw her again. A Candy…
Oscar bought a mannequin so he could drive the HOV lane at rush hour. He bid her off eBay and dressed her in an oversize pantsuit that his wife hadn’t worn since college. She had jagged cheekbones and a black wig. She was lean. His wife, Daphne, called her Dora. “Dora?” Oscar asked, staring at…
Contrails crisscrossing overhead, spreading puff by fading puff into each instant of the past… dull notes, antiphonal clouds lined out against the blue, arpeggios down that road as far as we can hope to go… …
The last time this type of celestial event was visible from Earth was more than seven hundred years ago. The Dark Ages. Dante was at work on the Commedia, writing in the mornings, breaking at noon to masturbate and have his tea, then back at his desk until dusk. King Philip IV ordered the kidnapping…
She was the stain in the teacup that spread up toward the handle. She was the handle that snapped off the hairbrush, and She was the hairbrush he tossed onto the fire, and She was the fire he carried each day in his pipe. She was the pipe the bath water rode to the river,…
That it was fine linen flawlessly stitched, as silken as new skin. That it was the color of ivory or an old book’s pages left blank in the front. In the beginning shape of the letter A, it made a long A sound. With lace. Because she was heard to say it…
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