When you visit the statue of Montaigne in Paris, you find him amidst overgrown greenery, almost sequestered in the bushes across from the Sorbonne, as if preferring, in bronze, the margin he chose in life. The first thing you notice is his shoe. Even at night, when I came upon him, the shoe emerges first,…
She had just won a major literary prize. She was slim, blond, and preposterously attractive. I was slim, blond, and preposterously awkward. Somehow I’d gotten into her poetry writing class as a first-semester freshman. I’d submitted a sonnet about a monk so consumed with sexual longing that he couldn’t pray. The monk was me, and…
for the Wu Tang Clan and 1992 Shaolin’s flowers, imperial and ready for slaughter. Bobby Digital wears the wings of the only saint he knows. Come blessed angel with your skull-cup of blood. Enter this chamber with your black sword and a streetcar full of flagging desire. When the children ask for water, give…
By the end of her thirties, Patricia Hampl had published two poetry collections and a critically acclaimed memoir. When a radio interviewer asked her what was next, she replied airily, “I have it in mind to work on fiction from now on.” What happened in the following years just goes to show that writers are…
1. According to the Talmud, only three sins in Jewish law are so serious they are forbidden under any circumstances, even to save a life. These are murder, idol worship, and adultery. But in many interpretations, there is a fourth sin, equal to, if not worse than, these: lashon hara—literally, “evil tongue.” It is said…
It’s not the shore; it’s the ocean that opens. Devil, make a mountain of me for the water to dwell against. I became aware of my methods and the methods changed me. Soldier, you make my body a map on the floor. It’s what the door is for— hesitation—a hand that wants to be a…
the horses are filthy in their winter coats grubby and matted manes mended with hay they flicker between snows like medieval orders of spiritual pilgrims; seen and invisible— unseen and real the blizzard continues and the world is the wind your eyes close to slits inside the drift and howl the horses aren’t yours /…
Many years ago, I decided to make an adventure movie about my family that had nothing to do with me. The family would live in the trees and swing from room to room making the leaves whistle, making the birds flustered. They would live there all year round, even in the snow, and when it…
When we looked at the circle, we felt powerless. Earth or fist our hands are bound together in protest. Bare my throat, I said, in a faceful of sand. I swallowed too much water. The property is private, the way we’ve come to think of grief as nonviolence, absence, lack, fasting as an act of…
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