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…
In the days before the wedding, as caterers and florists and seamstresses and bakers and even sommeliers and fromagers and charcutiers made appearances at the Maison ClosDennis, there were two of us who were irrelevant to the preparation of the proceedings. One of them, and this anyone could have predicted, was me, the boyfriend of…
for my mother, Veronica Cazier (1955-1991) The undertaker gripped my hand. I said I wanted Dairy Queen. I touched her cheek because I needed proof—and after, Dairy Queen. It’s what I asked for every day: to go to Dairy Queen. Worse than dead, she wasn’t quite herself. I pictured Dairy Queen. I’d finished second grade…
Ladette Randolph is Editor-in-chief of Ploughshares and the author of three books of fiction: two novels—Haven’s Wake (forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press, spring 2013) and the award-winning A Sandhills Ballad (University of New Mexico Press, 2009)—and the short story collection This Is Not the Tropics (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). Randolph is on the…
Given all of the anxiety about the future of literature in an electronic age, one thing that seems unlikely—despite the fears otherwise—is that as a culture we will stop reading. Rather, we seem to be reading (and writing) more than ever. By some counts, there were over four hundred thousand books published in this country…
When I decide to go to hear Handel’s Messiah in London at the composer’s parish church, my husband says he’d rather see a Thai horror movie, so we plan to meet later at our favorite Moroccan lair that serves huge platters of olives and fried goat brains, but here I am sitting in the pew…
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