Everything’s a window the professor told my class,and I thought about breaking that glass, or shuttingthe curtains, or better yet opening those windowsand climbing out into the snowy world beyond.He said fashioning windows is the only waywe can make sense of what we see, so evenas I walked off through that snow I must have…
My mother started writing essays in English,essays with wrong punctuation, wrong tenses,wrong spacing wrong spelling,with Arabic terms too, typed in English(and a French accent)when she cannot findthe translation for…mina.In her e-mail she tells me she’s very “exited” about this—her American teacher loves her ideas,even in her bad English.Their topic this week is “Now and Then,”the…
Tell us a little about yourself. Just so we can get to know each other. What you do for a living, what you love to read, a little about you as a writer and, of course, what you want to get out of this course. Include a picture if you’d like. It’s very helpful. This…
Somewhere there is order,a multiverse of order.I could havesewed that rip in the liningwith special strong thread,washed pillows for the refugees,cut new gardenias to replacethe yellowed blouses collapsedin the vase, called someone,hoping they’d be happyto hear from me. I could have faced the hard timewith the fortitude of my tribe,planted elephant garlic,loved you through this…
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…
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