Each summer when I’m in Krakow, I make weekly trips to a flea market close to our apartment. This particular market also sells antiques, but it doesn’t aspire to a loftier name, because it also peddles secondhand books, last year’s issues of fashion magazines, handmade jewelry, items that aren’t old in the sense that antiques…
Perhaps the single feature of the villanelle that twentieth-century poets made their own is the absence of narrative possibility… the form refuses to tell a story… —The Making of a Poem Don’t write a villanelle to tell a tale: they’re not the form for narrative or plot. It’s pretty obvious why…
My Pom’s 15, a centenarian dog, but that’s nothing to a tortoise. And next to a creosote bush in the Mojave Desert, oldest living protoplasm on earth, it’s a breath. And earth’s history, compared to the universe, an hour of yogic breathing. Such a tiny fraction, so little between .000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 and zero, my…
Colm Tóibín is a gentleman. A very witty, charming, lively, and sometimes deliciously louche gentleman, but a gentleman all the same, though one senses that he might not wish for that to be said too loudly. He has the beauty of a boxer—strong chest, light on his feet, precise in his movements and in his…
b. h. fairchild The Game Field lights that span the evening sky, siren songs of kind, loud girls in thigh-high skirts, the clatter of our shoulder pads and cleats, and then the crowd in its great hunger rising up as we stride across that green plane bright with new lime and dreams of high school…
Getting out of his car one night, he discovers—No! It’s gone!—the ring he’d worn on his left pinky for more than thirty years. He treasured it. Not because an old lover had given it to him—she’d stopped meaning anything to him decades ago. But because it was an elegant thing: “like gold to airy thinness…
Voyager 2 traveled another 800,000 miles today. Launched on August 20, 1977, the spacecraft is still sending data to the radio telescopes of the Deep Space Network in the Mojave desert around Goldstone. Any information dispatched today—about the solar winds that Voyager is flying through—will have taken thirteen hours to travel back 8.6 billion miles…
I am thirty-two, thirty-two times have I passed before the day and hour of my death, as one passes by the door of a house that one will someday live in, without even a thought of glancing at it. —Julian Green, Diary: 1928-1957 It could be empty, windowless, or simply occupied by ghosts, a kind…
My old boyfriend’s fortune cookie read, Your love life is of interest only to yourself. Not news to me. A famous writer once showed me the fortune in his wallet— You must curb your lust for revenge— slapped over his dead mother’s face. After finishing our Chinese meal at that god-forsaken mall, eight of us…
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