That’s how much time they give you to bribe the hall of records for the paperwork you bribe the foreman to sign, swearing you know nothing and owe nothing—no loans, no debts before you bribe a woman to sell your pots and pans, plates, plants, rugs, and record player, so you can bribe a dentist…
When I saw her in her urban kitchen— thin and smart in her charity-shop green dress— a glass wall was between us polished spotless with some soft cloth of mistrust. All winter she’d lived up the hill in the gray house with the damp walls, the rains fading the fields. The snow— its ice-floe memories…
I’ve watched this ultrasound so often I close my eyes and picture a daughter feathered with pixels, a putto’s skeleton. So here is a piece of art I own, a representation any impressionist would be proud of for it moves, though it doesn’t yet move me. But I do return, so she has achieved what…
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…
do you remember that bum you ran into in the bathroom of the Radisson washing himself with a rag his clothes in a pile in the corner he must have been in his sixties all smiles and still retarded by his father’s rage oh this man he said the things he did to me and…
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