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 mefinish my dinner. I can still seethe pinkish cream sauceblossoming on the china. I didn’t know yet if I could walkwhen 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 plastic from my wallet.I signed my name.No…
Why are people wearing antlers in the hospital cafeteria?—Because it’s Christmas, silly. Can’t you hear the sleigh bellsdrifting 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 stunned relatives get off…
I go around and turn the pages—the newestnews—for the paralytics on the porch.At least the day isn’t hot yet. So saysonly a gleam in an old man’s eye. A beezeroes in for the kill. I roll the ladiesto the shady side. No one wants wordof war. They go for a strangled baby on page three,continued…
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 forth all…
do you remember that bumyou ran into in the bathroom of the Radissonwashing himself with a rag his clothes in a pilein the corner he must have been in his sixtiesall smiles and still retarded by his father’s rageoh this man he said the things he didto me and my mother you wouldn’t believethey made…
He takes the bones of a pony, a pot of Earl Grey tea, a paintbrush and what remains of the bodywhere his students learned, for years, to name the parts, saying ulna, radius, tibia, skull. Saying femur, sternum, pelvis, clavicle. Is this not how god made Eve and Adam, more or less? The one from clay, the other from a rib…
It’s been a month now she’s been tutoring a dead girl on Park Avenue. She says as much into her cell. She’s walking fast to the subway so she won’t be late—she has to take three trains. “We’re doing vocab. Great Expectations.” “What’s that?” her mom says. “A blond girl? Does her hair color matter?”…
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