On a glorious, gilded Levantine morning, the day after the one-year anniversary of her husband’s death, we heard the flapping of Auntie Lulu’s strapless sandals climbing up the two flights of stairs to our landing. Glee and smile wrinkles overwhelmed my mother’s face. She looked invigorated, as if she’d been dunked in an Italian fountain…
I was looking at the Brian Bourke exhibition in the Fairgreen Gallery.? Outside, a man lay collapsed on the ground. It was freaking people out? they kept coming in telling the person? at the desk about the man on the ground. After a while the guards came, they were wearing blue gloves.? They knew the…
There is nothing for her to hold and everybody knows it. Nothing for her to hold, eight times over. Pieces of her babies, girly, ghostly, float toward her nightly tossing brain. Mom has a gene for dropping dead, but she won’t use it on her misery. God of Anthony, god of the thin good men…
Philadelphia can be called thicker— home of W. C. Fields and Governor Rendell. I’ve been flying barrier islands and the Jersey Shore stretching to land in this place with some shoulders and other padding. Has Philly sold out its paranoia? No, it stayed thick, a thick knee, a thick elbow, thick ribs, thick toes, thick…
For sorrow we have love and the waves dying in.? We can visit our lives in the country of winter trees and blue ruin. ?For the nameless we have silence.? Where tenderness runs out there is tenderness.? A trail descends into the next glen.? Our anti-muse’s hair is the color of loam.? For gospel she…
Wind takes your hair like a hooligan owl and leaves a deep pocket of dusk in your scalp. Love without pride is a love with no end. You keep calling me in to fill up your head, but the mutinous dust of the dead yellow field says better not listen to a thing with a…
If no one in my family ever spoke of it, if no one handed down? what it was to be born to power and married in a poor country. If no one wanted to remember? the noise of the redcoats cantering? in lanes bleached with apple flowers? on an April morning. If no one ever…
It was 1968 and there was a war between the men and the women. Jane heard it on the radio, where for the first time women’s voices read the news; and she saw it at school, where her art teacher, Miss Hannah Shapiro, had started going braless—great wandering breasts shifting this way and that under…
In the nick of school busses. Office slacks. The rest of the game: Welcome Home, Girl. Critical objects to fragment and pony, sure—but I got this softshoe doublestep down. Books all memorized. You rolled some tardy & went fish-eyed in the cut: a tired, trifling air kiss bye-bye. But that’s the providence of maybe. The…
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