Article

  • Secret Fellow Sufferers,

                                 I’ve come a long way to the pulpit today to advance our causes: No more coal-mine canaries. Abolish Susan Jeffries who teases Max Biggins who sits on the seesaw and cries and cries. May she admit she wants to marry him; may the foremen confess that oft in the dark and brute weight of their…

  • Secret Fellow Sufferers,

                                have you been the unwinged thing perched and testing the phone-wire’s teeter? Have you weighed the big Pro against the many feath’ry Cons? Have you watched the brows of standers-below as they fell into wish from honest worry? Sometimes the wind off the lake sounds like a siren approaching your rescue, instead of the air…

  • “Before this dream…”

    Before this dream there is a blue dress, a tangle of trees and the distance between voices. There is routine sorting of like things: bank statements, unopened letters, photographs turned inward from     the damp.There are cows in clusters, truck stops, cinder block churches, scattered     tractors and fields cleared and flooded. Before this dream there is a scored…

  • “A Field of Dry Grass”

    Osaka   Hard to imagine Basho died here in a rented room above a flower shop in 1694, as I pause today on Dotonbori Street, shoppers brushing past on either side, to gaze at the giant red mechanical crab stretching its legs over the door of the Kani Doraku seafood restaurant, its eye stalks rotating…

  • Penance

    I offer upthis flowerbox my skull dear whomeverlet its luxuriance exceed its basenesslet me curl in the blueblackroot hairs and wait for youwind in my teeth will sough sweetly

  • Waiting at the River

    Sometimes, I’m tired of being a mother, weary of holding her in my mind, her words brighter than mine, the light’s movement on the rock. Look, I say, Listen, to what my daughter said. (tired of being) reasonable and calm, answering to Mom and how sweet (the sound) my name in her mouth, her mouth…

  • About Alice Hoffman

    “When I went to a movie set for the first time, I felt that the person I was most like was the set designer,” Alice Hoffman tells me as we sit in a room whose centerpiece is a vivid bouquet of the same tea roses that bloom in the yard beyond the window behind her….