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That dog never barked, not a whimper, so it was heaven living next door to Pickwick and his mistress, Elzbieta, the Polish novelist on Brattle Street, my first apartment, my first year out of grad school. Elzbieta escaped the Warsaw ghetto, then worked for the Resistance during the war. What had I accomplished at 24?…
for Kay Ryan We sharpen our lapidary eyes toward flaws, and see the easy cz disguise, the phrase too pleased to please. We loupe the soldering for telltale fracturing. We will not be fooled. But let us withdraw the ball-peen hammer from its velvet swaddling, let us address the listing prong, the innocuous ding: we…
From The Other Side of the World By the time I arrived home, my father’s tag sale had taken place, and Seana, who bought the works, had moved in with him. A good deal for them both, she claimed. She got all his leftovers—and he got her. Here’s the ad my father put in the…
Pain cloisters itself deep in the body like a ladybug nestling into a pinecone. She finds a pinecone split in two, its spine revealed. It is as if she has discovered her own corpse. What force could split a pinecone down the center? Improbable bolt of lightning, bright finger of pleasure? Perhaps it has lain there for years The ashes have drifted She is lost in the pine forest of…
On the park bench You turn the page of a travelogue— Henry James is eating the last of a puffy croissant Near the border of Italy and France. A crumb has attached Itself to his beard—oh, the faux pas Of greeting Madame du Coudray, With his top hat coming off, His bow like a bending…
The moths in the orchard squeal with each pass of the mistral wind. Yet the reapers and their scythes, out beyond the pear trees, slay wheat in sure columns. Christ must have been made of shocks of wheat. When they lashed him, four bundles of fine yellow burst forth from each welt. And the women,…
They seem disappointed in you, these faceless women, these shrinking enlargements standing around you, some turning away from the eye you can see through. You want to be open about all this, but what’s left of your mouth won’t say so, and what’s right can’t say anything good or bad. You wonder where you’ve been…
“I hate Ladytown—so much can go wrong down there.” —Steph Things weren’t looking good in Ladytown. True, it was always lush, like D.C. in August, high humidity, but that year the very brickwork sweated salt. That year the Metro chafed the tunnel walls and the train whistles’ wail rose to a new pitch of dismay,…
How do you hold the dead when they’re hammered into a room so flat you can pick your teeth with one corner of the picture? When you were the one at that moment aiming the cheap camera at her wanting to fold her light into a square locket of time. You could see Noah’s Ark…
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