Sadie’s lover, Marcus, called her every Thursday from Chicago as he drove to and from marriage counseling. (His wife drove separately, it goes without saying.) The end result of this was that it felt as if the three of them were in counseling together, but Sadie sort of liked that. The reason Marcus had to…
Marked by Apollo with a red coin on the forehead, this one still waits, solitary, uncoupled on extraordinary legs, not gull-like or chicken-like, not tree-clinging or perching. He dreams a wet return to the sand flats and shallows of the Blackjack Peninsula, of flying over lands with mutual wing easing their flight as in Paradise…
In late summer I swim across the lake to the stand of reeds which grows calmly in the foot-deep water on the other side. It is like going to a florist’s shop you have to take your clothes off to get to, where nothing is for sale and nothing on display but some tall, vertical…
(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…
No products in the cart.