As John hurried to the resident locker room after doing his rounds at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, he noticed a sixtyish Korean lady in red sweats cautiously stalking him from about twenty feet away. At first, John thought the wrinkled woman might be a figment of his overworked brain, as he was always tired to the…
When Barbara Perez moved from San Antonio to Boston—a city she’d never visited—to join a new program’s first MFA class, she revealed a certain willingness to take risks. Her work radiates the same willingness, using logic twined with metaphor to explore passion’s depths. In poems like “Bottle,” mindfulness is the natural way to express feeling…
Iris wants to walk on the beach with her feet in the ocean and the sun on her face. She wants to eat greasy hamburgers and drink pints of beer and throw peanut shells on the floor. She wants to wear high heels, polish the silver, dance the tango, bake a cake, plant peonies, daydream,…
Major or minor, says Baseball Diamond Sutra, what does it matter? The boys of summer know that nirvana is just one inning away. Deep in the outfield, a glove reaches toward sky— fireflies blink on. Over the bleachers, a blank scoreboard announces no wins, no losses.
Better a monosyllabic life than a ragged and muttered one; let its report be short and round like a rifle, so that it may hear its own echo in the surrounding silence. —Thoreau A life: pared to the bone. Think of a room with no chair,…
Not long ago, I met a woman in her eighties in the parking lot of a library in Florida. I had been at the library to give a reading, and one member of the audience waited for me after everyone else had left, despite the brutal, engulfing heat. The stranger was attractive, elegant, and well-dressed,…
This is a story about pretending. Imagine my father, a boy, not the old man who bought this shuttered house I have just cleaned out, here at the tropical tip of Florida, but a boy of six, seven, eight, in a one-room school with snow-bent eaves, with another black eye, another chipped tooth, pretending he’s…
Far away from this house, far from Concord, grew orchards where willowy women read scrolls, not stiff-backed books, picked pomegranates, not apples. There, as in fairy tales, houses glittered like gilt-edged books, princes and princesses walked in concord under the sun’s golden apple. But women had to be practical in this house, while the transcendentalist…
Not the rising sun, but the setting sun. Not the father, but the mother. Not the cross, but the circle, drawn in ink, not blood. The Word inhabited but unspoken, like a bell unrung. A cathedral of the mind, gray and cool as Time, with doors so tall and heavy that I must tug and…
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