She doesn’t know which aspect of the piece makes her want to become part of the space of the room—the midnight safety of the gathered sheet, pulled up at one corner to protect, to comfort, to block the light so white, to be sucked on around saliva-wet fingers, to hide; or the white light of…
Say no now and you will get off easy. Maybe. The firebrand in your heart is only a rental, Just a spent ember with nothing left to do Than plead guilty, not no contest. Now go, Go to your room and gawk, or else text-message Yourself, write runes, or if the rhinencephalon In your boiling…
Colette published this exploration of jealousy around the time she separated from her lover Missy, the Marquise de Belbeuf (1862-1945). It was first printed February 22, 1912, in Le Matin, a newspaper edited by her soon-to-be second husband, Henri de Jouvenel (1876-1935). I’m chewing on a sprig of bitter herb that makes my saliva…
If I get religious for a minute, it will be to keep terms with the bewildered caul of being thirteen, surrounded by the dead. What used to peek through the roof, never so much stroking string things and eating afterlife biscuits, as making sound like a wonky piano dragging its broken leg in an interminable…
My father was alone when he picked me up, which I found deeply disappointing. He explained that his new VW station wagon was tiny and Ernest was tall for fourteen—too tall to fit with my luggage in the back seat. I’d never had a brother before and I’d never been to South Africa before. The…
after Issa I think it’s enough just to sit and meditate, heedless of the needs of others close to us and of their perpetual demands that seem to sap the strength from us. My doorway and the morning dew are all I need to make my day, and that is where I’ll plan to be….
I. Mostly it was a great job—a real joy, the nurse usually told people when they asked—but every once in a while there were things that shocked her—or, rather, things that when she had first come to the ward shocked her: now nothing did. Or almost nothing. Every once in a while something happened that…
The cookies his neighbors brought by didn’t taste like pity— at my father’s house for the first time, after, the locks broken into, now new, when cross the street comes a neighbor, cookies shrouded in tinfoil, a plate I need not return. How long had the pair kept vigil out the window for someone to…
The grandmother was a bright, cellophane-wrapped hard candy of a person: sweet, but not necessarily what a child wanted. She knew it too. That sad bicentennial summer, her son in the hospital recovering from surgery, she and her granddaughter looked for comfort all over Des Moines: at the country club, the dinner club, the miniature-golf…
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