That Sunday morning, long ago, a golden light trickled in through the window of my basement apartment and stung my boyfriend and me. It stung our eyes and stung our hearts to see our predicament sharply outlined: It was late October in Reykjavik and the sun had come to say goodbye. We’d be left in…
It’s a small mark, quick cut, a single stroke. An incident, not the main event, on the page—more flicked than drawn, starting at the top and moving, diagonally, down to the left. A diacritic. It’s a diacritic. I don’t want to use the word accent. (That question, which plagues me in the francophone world: D’où…
After it all, a bridesmaid hands you the vodka you’ve waited for, so clear and chill it tastes bell-like against your tongue, as though it could hollow you from your heart outward, hollow you as February hollows the fields beyond the church, the sliced cornstalks thinly rustling. You’re impatient for crocuses, for their scent of fresh petrichor, their…
It’s getting toward my timeto be enrolled among the legionsof the fallen pretty-good poets.A grateful earth has patted their heads. And here’s my head,this failing crop of white hairsmown to stubble;these dry discolored lumpshalf-hidden in it, recalling all those makeshift graves in the bullet-mownCornfield at Antietam.—And then came hundreds of mourning doves,to peck at the…
City-born, we’d never livedin view of a horizon, or beneath the expansiveblue above sheep, but rent in Iowa was cheap,including more green beans than we could eat,wildflowers grew from water in empty jars. In fall,the hardwoods burn without a fire and make no excusefor what’s in store. And everything withinwas ours, no one else behindthe…
After they split, my father used scissors to cut my mother from our childhood photos; blacked out her name in the lower-left corners of large paintings of wild horses, of men huddled together in a desert wedding against a burnt sienna sky, of little scarlet gondolas in Venice, the canal always the same cerulean. I…
Beginning, I said, or becoming. He began dissecting my choice. No -ing words, no developing or growing—who are you now, not who are you beginning to be? I began stammering. I didn’t like not being believed, I knew that, even if I didn’t know anything else about myself. I’d begun the day not knowing him….
First date, bowling alley. Poor choice, no chance to talk, one of us always taking a turn. When he bowled, his hip curved, same stance as when he played trumpet, school band where we met. After two games, still silent, we held hands in our center lane, the eye, movement all around us, bowlers, spinning…
After Camille Dungy’s “characteristics of life” TodayI misheard the word eternity as the trinity. I was looking at those birds, falling from the sky,thousands of them, a photo of their corpses inthe Times, lined up on a white sheet of paper, like words. Warbler.Flycatcher. Swallow. Eternity. Trinity.Die-off. An airplane passes overhead, then another. The cradle…
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