(A small, and still isolated, incident in New York shows what can happen if authentic authority in social relations has broken down to the point where it cannot work any longer even in its derivative, purely functional form. A minor mishap in the subway system—the doors on a train failed to operate—turned into a serious…
Before they put Cousin Gladys inside the ground in a cornrow of fair-skinned Creole men, I sat in her funeral mass imagining two shadows dancing in the swish of a swift moving blade that slit her dreams in half and sent her father strolling across the cane field like a land-bending river, turning a page…
The kind Italian driver of the bus to Rome invited her to his house—she was obviously hungry—and gave her sandwiches and raped her. All those years ago—she smiles while telling it—contemptuous, somehow of her younger self, who drags behind her like a can. Grammar is great but who will write the sentence that includes the…
Along a familiar hiking trail I recognize agave, sage, the summer-blooming yucca, and sticky monkey flower. * As if they might be learning a new dance, elders plant their feet on steady ground, gathering wind in their arms to move cloud hands. * Returning home tonight I avoid crushing a snail that casts a scant…
for Linda Gregg Safe in the light along the bank Being in believing No name Only being On the bank radiant and blank Safe watching and seeing On the brink Of the light Blank No blame in being Waiting then breathing in being Seeing Singing Let my voice …
After the death of his wife, Loring began giving away things for free. His sister-in-law worried it was some kind of “suicide thing,” as his brother Bill put it, which only showed how little they knew him. Loring wasn’t suicidal. If anything, in the four months since Gloria died, there was a new kind of…
The room cannot feel its arteries stuffed with animal fat from the insulation. Cannot hope to alter its mouth and eating is not a thing that it can do well. The room hasn’t taken a bath since 1987, but there was a slight wash in 1992 bestowing the room its perforated body. The room cannot…
Alan Zimmer had been staying at the Kirschbergs’ for a week when he saw their daughter in the elevator at Brigham and Women’s. She was in a wheelchair. Alan, behind her, recognized the yellow kinks of her hair, and the dark roots that cleaved to her part. He stepped forward. “Jenna! What are you doing…
They’d traveled one by one on their knees beneath the earth to be gathered at the station to be given robes and haloes and official papers. And a bus ticket each to the roadside motel in Ohio that held the reservations in their names, where those who’d been slain before them were waiting. Can these…
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