We’re in the middle of it, in the middle of the backyard barbecuing steak and chicken. Telling stories with our wives and girlfriends away, red and blue psychedelics, Coors Light and breasts falling into our mouths again like basalt cliffs into the sea. Jeremy says, I did CPR on a gorilla once. A girl gorilla,…
we are not asked to see, the ridged folds of the black walnuts, fallen, come veined as any mind split from its skull, leaching what little parades as peace. Rot and wet. My right instep, sneaker’s underneath, crushes a once greener skin gone brackish at the cap. Looking up, the branches meet in an arch…
If, in the 1980s, you had been a resident of one of those communities associated with the term, “urban renewal” might occur to you as double-edged with its bureaucratic optimism, and the implied whitewashing—easy as calling a do-over—of recent history. And if parts of your community were within the expansion radius of an ambitious university,…
And every morning the sun comes up. And the pretty coffee in a cup. And a bird meowing outside in a tree. And, on the ceiling, the water stain of England made sadder by singing in a minor key. The size of a coffin, and full of bees. Shadow on a tractor, mowing the field….
When I hear the young refer to someone as a douche bag, I want to say, You may have never seen a douche bag. They were red rubber bags, like hot water bottles, you’d fill it and hang it high enough so that gravity…I can’t go on, I see my mother’s douche bag, my poor…
Clear, please, as a glass house. Ladled in plates, liquid form, silica, sand, dolomite, lime. Then be tempered, shaped, craned till you stand fastened to the forest floor, reflecting. And if a sudden garden struts up, rising in ribboned slope of pine and pin oak, laurel or fleabane, you can draw markers for their names,…
“What’s wrong with Vanderbilt? Not that she’d get in necessarily,” Mrs. Holtzmann said to no one in particular. “There are plenty of good schools in the South.” She stood in the doorway of her classroom with her arms crossed. “Heil Holtzmann,” Audrey said under her breath. It was Monday. She was kneeling at her locker…
So here are the strange feelings that flicker in you or anchor like weights in your eyes. Turn back and you might undo them, the way trees seem to float free of themselves as they root. A swan can hold itself on the gray ice water and not waver, an open note upon which minor…
When I meet you, it’s not just the two of us meeting. Your mother is there, and your father is there, and my mother and father, and what they might have thought of each other. And our people—back from our folks, back—are there, and what they might have had to do with each other; if…
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