So when the doctor pulls the camera tube out of my rectum, the old joke comes to mind. “Wrecked ’em?” I say. “I slayed ’em!” The nurse lets herself out, carrying a fresh cut of me between two little panes of glass. The doctor rewards me with a snort, but I can see he’s only…
I loved to walk down to the café where she worked and stare at the menu with the Brains Beurre Noir halfway down the page. She’d come to my table with her order pad, pleasant and placid, dressed all in white like a nurse, and her wonderful smell, strong and female, would enter me like…
In a waiting room at the Kresge Eye Center, my fingers trace the outline of money folded into pocket and I know the two hundred fifty dollars there is made up of two hundred forty-five I can’t afford to spend but will spend on a calm voice to tell me how I am to be…
In the stories it’s different: grief, like the dark, lifts eventually— a tenderness inside which, with all the clarity of bells when for once they ring like nothing but the ringing bells they are, it can seem that at last you’ve gotten away with something, like a horse you’ve stolen that, now, lighter than ash…
There might have been other reasons Heather and I beat the hell out of each other when we performed in The Miracle Worker in the fall of 1984, but the best I could come up with was that she and I just weren’t able to fake it. Heather and I had been in a few…
for TP The woman down the hall has a girlfriend. When they fell in love the sea was a finger. It pushed them both in the belly. It rubbed their lips. It ran itself up and down their thighs. Then they got married. The sea came to the wedding and ate the shrimp cocktail. Had…
Then the Great Dane became an arrow of smoke in a wind pipe of smoke, so I had to burn the body. He’d always considered himself king of infinite dominions: king of the bone, king of the living room, king of the elevator, king of the field. The ashes I scattered in a park close…
All one needs to belong to the company Of the truly grateful is to feel grateful, Just as I felt when, retrieving a sock This afternoon from behind the dryer, I found the book you lent me Four years ago, two years before your heirs Sold off your library. Did you ever wonder What had…
A poem about “Still Life with Fruit, Wine, Glasses, and a Bowl of Cherries,” by Hendrik van Streek, can’t stay in the painting for long unless it takes a closer look at the blue bowl holding the cherries and wonders, as the wall label wonders, whether that’s Chinese porcelain shipped to Europe by the Dutch…
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