I am sitting next to you & you are not there,you’re a frameless heat, mass of ruptured air. to be clear, you are the spit & liver it takesto be human & I want it & I think you want me to have it all, but I knowwhat it’s like to be one of the…
Every evening after the network news, Dolly and her son watch “Jeopardy!” The habit dates back thirty years, to Bruce’s moody adolescence. Naturally shy, he was prone even then to sudden, awkward displays of confidence. “Jeopardy!” let him show off his worldly knowledge, which for a boy who’d seldom left the state of Maryland—who wouldn’t…
There are feelings I would rather not have,so I avoid certain types of texts and images—particularly pornography. Sometimes I think this makes mea better person, but, in actuality, it also makes me a coward.Am I so afraid I’ll enjoy some ridiculously sexist fantasy?I’m not sure what I’d do with the uglinessI’d find inside me. Don’t…
The last tug at the sleeve lets her blouse falloff shoulders to breasts that have never seena lover, she shudders, shakes so hard I touch the bones inside the song of this afternoonto stop the loud way our fear of us rattles herin the flutter of bugs so fragile they can tear in the wind….
I was in Florence, Italy, when my father died. It was Easter Sunday and I was staying with old friends, the Marchettis, in their apartment near Piazza delle Cure, a quiet neighborhood on the north edge of town that you entered from via Faentina. We hadn’t gone into the center for the big Easter celebration,…
Out in the open, there is a cowshed.There are the expected gaps and hornets. Here lives our story, where we used to meet—You smelled like hay, were always listening to some other sound, the buzzing of your ownideas chasing us down. You began building a staircase out of thorny branches, then a vest out of…
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 set foot here so they…
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…
In the country of urgency, there is a language. —Grace Schulman I must have said somethingto the man in my confusion when I put my hand on his shoulder long enough for a cement truck to breeze by—it would have killed him— instantly, I think, when the light changes and its change falls through our long…
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