I’m resting on a bench in the cemeterywhile Ned scrawls his self-delighted wild-boy traceover the slopes of grass, but we can’t stay long, since it’s a day I need to go into the city,and when I stand up suddenly my left leg’s half a footlower than my right, because I’ve stepped into the sunken, newly…
The vessel is simple, a rowboat among yachts.No one hides a Tommy gun in its case.No bluesman runs over his uke in a whiskey rage. The last of the Hawai’ian queens translated the namegift that came here, while Portuguese historians translatejumping flea, the way a player’s fingers pick and fly. If you have a cigar…
This endless room is deep blue, dark red.I’m wearing my Valentino gown, vintage silhouettebut hand-stitched for me. It’s the same purpleas my favorite twilight, just as I requested. Everyone is here—I can see across the waythe black-rooted starlets and reality queensdrinking acai Cosmos. And I can see the disgracedcongressman studying his notes at the bar,…
“No Loitering” reads the sign by the school.But what about a school that offers coursesIn loitering as an art, each class designedTo break another link in the argumentThat we ought to be somewhere else by nightfall,Ought to start now if we’re to arrive on timeFor the meeting of those in need of a truthWe’ve distilled…
The child imitating a dragonflyzoomed into the dusty elmsand came back a child. The child mocking a fireflylit and went outuntil he was invisible. In honor of nightthe child closed his eyes. The child pretending to be a childburned to grow old, soon he weptin dry coughs. Always the wind like a comb in your…
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…
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