for Allen Grossman Here’s a side effect that’s very front and center:I am forgetting the words for things. It’s not a matter of mistaking the Ash for the Linden, of conjuringthe chickadees to my hand from the Arrowwood. They are a certain kind of medicine like the imageof the beech leaves moving in a wind…
(for Jeanne) 1 There were only certain stones we could step on to cross the river. 2 The stones we could step on to cross the river …
For my daughter: these images,these trenches of script. She keepsreaching to pull themfrom the page, as if the bookwere an opened cabinet; every time, the pageblocks her hand. They’re rightthere—those picturesvivid as stained glass,those tiny, inscrutable knots. They hang in that spacewhere a world was builtin fits and erasures—she wantsto lift that worldinto her own….
A gray row of corrugated huts hunkering down in rain. Across the way the fire burns night and day though unseen in sun light. Bernard wakens to the aroma of warming milk and burned coffee. Later we’ll say he had the bearing of an angel with clear eyes, a wide brow, thick golden curls. His…
ALBA 1 8 a.m. and we punch outand leave the place to our betters.2,000 miles and fifty yearslater and at my back I alwayshear Chevy Gear & Axlegrinding the day shift workersinto antiquity. ALBA 2 The river works.No one flips a switch, no oneshouts “Ready Set Go!” no onewrites a memo,…
Sad jar of atoms, I say when Jacqui cuts her thumb instead of a cucumberor returns from her run wet as a dog. Sad jar yourself, she says after acop clocks me doing 45 in a school zone. This is called borrowing aByronic phrase describing life and attaching it to your beloved. We’vetried other terms…
The sky was still dark when Trung Ngoc woke to a tap on her shoulder. She had been dreaming. In her dream, she was riding her brother’s bicycle from her village in Vo Cuong to the nursing school in Hanoi. The endless dirt road and the heat had put her in a trance. When she…
She is crushing on a younger guy after many conversations aboutthings like the brain’s musical notations or quinoa recipes. Hisround face, wire rims almost ubiquitous, every young man at workkind of looks like that. She tells her husband about the crush, hethinks it’s probably good for her. When she talks to her crush sheforgets to…
Because my grandmother is deadbut because when she lived she favored this place,I too have crossed the rutted roadand come to Mohanraj Jewellers.At seven on a Sunday evening I could wire cash or purchase rubies.I could change my dollars for a packet of bills the size of a grown man’s shoe—enough to buy shoes for…
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