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…
He takes the bones of a pony, a pot of Earl Grey tea, a paintbrush and what remains of the body where 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…
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?”…
Derek moved into the attic in August, and suddenly there were guns in Lucy’s house. Two: a rifle and a shotgun. There was a difference between them, Lucy had learned, though they looked the same to her, both dark-wooded and smoothly tarnished, antique-y, as if they belonged above a mantelpiece instead of propped up in…
I pick the lock of every knock in the night or rasp of leaves until I hear his voice as it was in life. Even when I want the past as charred as these pine logs gasping for air in the stove, heartwood turned to cinder no hand can make whole again, I say grace…
When I change lanes on I-70 North toward the St. Louis airport, my father points to my sideview mirrors and asks how I like them angled. He tells me he keeps his tilted to show only a trace of his car, a shadow, enough to see where it ends and the asphalt picks up. And…
Your grandfather and I walk alike, each of us counting the brittle spaces in getting older. At the desk I explain I want to see my son, and I see you are now digits on a sheet. Black men in black—the brothers—make sure you obey the rules. It is like the times I had to…
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