The Tartars say: After the wedding, we don’t need the music. And in Yiddish it is said: It’s the last one whom the dogs attack. The Italians say: The last to arrive must shut the door. The English say: The last suitor wins the maid. They also say: No one has ever seen tomorrow. Spaniards…
“No Loitering” reads the sign by the school. But what about a school that offers courses In loitering as an art, each class designed To break another link in the argument That we ought to be somewhere else by nightfall, Ought to start now if we’re to arrive on time For the meeting of those…
The child imitating a dragonfly zoomed into the dusty elms and came back a child. The child mocking a firefly lit and went out until he was invisible. In honor of night the child closed his eyes. The child pretending to be a child burned to grow old, soon he wept in dry coughs. Always…
It takes real skill to speed down the packed streets of Zhongguancun, but the singer with the mohawk is handling it like a pro. His asymmetrical spikes are poking the roof of his dad’s sedan, so he’s compensating by tilting his head slightly to the left. We are meeting with a new band to talk…
It was a straw light, a blond light, a water light in the window when I looked outside and saw it was still daylight, flooding the hot, white room of her death that had been the hot, white room of her maternal loneliness. The heel of my hand hard on her sternum as her heart,…
Even in this broken country, the women wanted to go shopping. The men arranged to have a guide from the hotel take their wives into town. The men were used to indulging the wives; the wives were used to being indulged; everyone was used to everyone else’s behaving in agreement with generally held, old-country expectations….
In the Plan B essay series, writers discuss their contingency plans, extraliterary passions, and the roads not traveled. I’ve been pushed from my own rooms by my own things. I now live in the belfry, batty as a spinster aunt, with just a little circle of stained glass as my window out. I pick petals…
When I woke, makeup-smeared and sallow, everyone was gone. Greasepaint smooth in the new line of my cheek and corset-bruises on my hips, first warm day of the year. A false eyelash settled like a moth on my collarbone. They loved me on the high wire last night in my spangled tights all done up…
Is poetry ruining my life, I wonder, upstairs in a house with more windows than walls where I am trying to write or read it. Downstairs “Lady in the Dark,” complete with dialogue, too loud, and the purr of my husband’s snore. I feel a fume coming on, kindling for an inferior rage that will…
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