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,…
Before she told me, she let me finish my dinner. I can still see the pinkish cream sauce blossoming on the china. I didn’t know yet if I could walk when I pushed myself back from the table. This is what gets me: I didn’t throw the stained dish against the wall. I slipped the…
Why are people wearing antlers in the hospital cafeteria? —Because it’s Christmas, silly. Can’t you hear the sleigh bells drifting down like pesticide from all the hidden speakers? Mr. Johansson says he doesn’t get paid enough to wear a Santa hat, but everybody else just goes along with it. It’s winter, the elevators ding, the…
I go around and turn the pages—the newest news—for the paralytics on the porch. At least the day isn’t hot yet. So says only a gleam in an old man’s eye. A bee zeroes in for the kill. I roll the ladies to the shady side. No one wants word of war. They go for…
Now and again I get a whiff of something, the uneasy stillness before a hard and fast rain, and I can almost remember before, when I first moved in and the world was not yet fixed concretely beyond the edges of my skin. Poverty was novel then, even briefly thrilling and romantic, and it was…
After I finally got over my sense of being a character in a book, and the innocence had gradually drained out of me through the holes life punctured in my container, that’s when I finally had time to stoop down and look closely at the dry, exhausted-looking grass next to the sidewalk, blowing back and…
No products in the cart.