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  • Provincetown

    This undistinguished        shingled        condominium is closer to Route Six than to the sea so that muffled sound we hear is cars, not waves. The occupants of the adjacent unit are often in the driveway keyboarding in cars. No one is keyboarding, of course, at dawn when I leave for the beach so I can beat…

  • Sweet Disposition

    Thoughts have gone wolf again, hunting for reasons in the dark.Suppose we were never               supposed to fallinto each other’s arms? Made a bone-boattossed all our memories in—              watched it sail. There’s a chance I know nothing and I will stickto you like…

  • The Invisible Book

    Sometimes when I’m reading, I’m distracted by the invisible book underneath the book I’m actually reading and the problem is this: it’s better. It’s like the superball under the couchthat your fingertips barely brush: the slightest contact and it’s gone, gliding easily away, because its form is nearly perfect, there, a sphere in the darkness…

  • In Minneapolis, My Father

    watched a crew wipe the family namefrom the face of our supper club. The new owners slappeda cartoon moose on the sign out front. If I tell him I love him,either he is holding my little hand while we step across an icy parking lottoward a greasy burger joint or he is on his deathbedand…

  • K Becomes K

    I recently went to an appointment with a terrorist I used to know. He lives near me in New York City, and when he wrote me a letter that said Dear Sashi, come and see me, without thinking very much about it, I did. Even when I was a little girl in Sri Lanka, before…

  • By Morning, New Mercies

    Ellis Howard was sitting on the back porch, oiling the barrel of an old flintlock rifle that he had propped across his knees, when the neighbor girl appeared before him, scabby and slouching, pulling at the hem of a yellow cotton dress, and asked him if he had seen her dog that had run off…

  • Pilgrimage

    I am not inclined to go off with strangers, yet here I am sitting outside a bar in Miradoux, a village in southwestern France, about to embark on a two-day journey along the Chemin, the Way, with Priscilla, a woman I met just days before. We will walk along a route called Le Puy, which…

  • Planet of Fear

    Here was my Wednesday ten o’clock: Robert James Coates, according to the file on my desk. But he refused to answer to that name, and at our first meeting, after the guard left us alone, insisted I call him Dog, which naturally I wouldn’t do. “All right, then, whatever, call me D,” he said agreeably,…