The vessel is simple, a rowboat among yachts. No one hides a Tommy gun in its case. No bluesman runs over his uke in a whiskey rage. The last of the Hawai’ian queens translated the name gift that came here, while Portuguese historians translate jumping flea, the way a player’s fingers pick and fly. If…
This endless room is deep blue, dark red. I’m wearing my Valentino gown, vintage silhouette but hand-stitched for me. It’s the same purple as my favorite twilight, just as I requested. Everyone is here—I can see across the way the black-rooted starlets and reality queens drinking acai Cosmos. And I can see the disgraced congressman…
Praise scissors that clip split ends easily as ex- boyfriends. The one who died in college, the refugee who crossed a blood-soaked Nile, but never could get over you. Praise coffee and Kentucky bourbon. Daughters pulled deep into Ohioan corn, romances banished to backseats and barstools, and newlyweds two-stepping to the second line waving paper…
is another thing Nietzsche said that hits me as pretty specious, if not entirely untrue, while sitting in my car in the Costco parking lot, listening to the Ballet Mécanique of metal buggies shrieking as each super, singular, and self-contained wisdom of this Monday morning rumbles its jumbo packs of toilet paper and Diet Coke…
Out back of the motel, a man and a boy feed alligators in the dark. I can see them past the curtains. Past the paisley curtains and through the cracked and dirty pane of glass, I see them, like shadows, see them and the slow, casting motions they make. I see things leave their hands,…
Did you ever see stars? asked my father with a cackle. He was not speaking of the heavens, but the white flash in his head when a fist burst between his eyes. In Brooklyn, this would cause men and boys to slap the table with glee; this might be the only heavenly light we’d ever…
When I hit thirteen, the noun between my legs turning into a verb, my father sat me down and said: one day you will have a wife of your own. A man will come—a helpful neighbor knocking while you’re at work perhaps, or a garlicky colleague at an office party, or a lifeguard on a…
Describing her, I say, she’s a Modigliani face-wise but when she walks in her custom-size narrow boots she minces, or half-dances like a pony, the sort of pony who is dear and a little silly and wears a hat with a ribbon. A little of this and a little of that—lacking a territorial integrity, she…
By wings whose shapes are but half a heart? Feathers oiled with country clubs and gasps of delight? Not for these the sandhill crane shakes her beaded voice. Gauche and gangrene, she is the gatekeeper of gibe, a cement-gray song edged and pocked in grassy fields, a frock of scarlet over her eye, her own…
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