but don’t read this poem whose title implies I think you’re old but youare at least older than me time passing makes everyone old unlessdeath and I don’t want that which is not to say I’m terrified but don’tnot read this poem because you’ve died! I’d rather insult you what Imean is—oh look! I think…
In Donald Barthelme’s “The School,” you end up in a classroom where everything dies. The orange trees, the snakes, the tropical fish, the salamanders, the puppy, the Korean orphan, the grandparents, the parents, even some of the students. In just two pages, the story has the momentum of a howitzer, piling the bodies up in…
You said yourself, if it has a mouth you mustn’t trust it. May you lose this fight. Dragging the double-blade over your leg in the shower you think of his face. Such power you found in bathing him, his tattoos—needled with guitar strings and Bic ink while others kept watch down-tier: a woman with seven…
Asking two memoir writers to have a conversation, as Ploughshares’ editor did when she suggested I write Nick Flynn’s profile, almost assures an interview without biography. Memoir writers are vague on matters of record. We’re interested in using fact and detail. We’re interested in the gorgeous influence of pain in all its mystery and nonsense….
From my diary, April 22, 1994: …came home to the news that Richard Nixon, a man who let me down again and again, and to whom I felt deeply connected—whether I was wearing a Nixon-Lodge button at the age of 9, or having a shouting match with my father over the Cambodian invasion ten years…
3In hospital I convalesced and read the melodrama presented in LeFigaro: “On the morning of 16 November, it is alleged, Professor ofPhilosophy Louis Althusser strangled his wife during what has beenruled a psychotic break.” I am not psychotic, though I have indeed killedmy wife. She is dead, it’s true. Not scuttling between trap doors beneaththe…
She swims in open water, the alternate self. There is no boat. She is alone. There is no predicting the conditions. Some days, the water is flat and still, her strokes pushing through a membrane of surface warmth and into a chill beneath. Some days, the waves are so vast they lift her high on…
At the beginning of the third book of the Odyssey, Telemachus’ ship pulls into the harbor of sandy Pylos, as the morning light burnishes the sea. Homer tells us: The sun rose from the still, beautiful water Into the bronze sky, to shine upon the gods And upon men who die on the life-giving earth….
What a reprieve from all this stultifying heat. And all the threats implicit in that heat: the sweep and snare of blackberry, razor barb of concertina wire. The bluish teasel nearly chafed you with its bracts. You’ve made it through some muck with your absolute body still intact. So far, the Camp Far West lake…
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