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Make-A-Wish

Charlie Teitlebaum, a forty-two-year-old surgeon born and raised in the same Boston neighborhood in which Howard had grown up, had not been one of Howard’s residents, but while Charlie was doing his internship at The George Washington School of Medicine, where Howard was on the faculty, he and Howard became friends. At the time, Charlie…

Sunblind at Huayapam

Through blue glass, a table painted blue, roses vermilion, Amber tumblers, candlesticks, a mirror darkening until all Grays in oncoming light. Goats bleat, radioblare, a gunshot. Past the celosia, a tree where yellow birds feed; heat and wind From the mountains. Close your eyes and retinas scald The window crimson, mullions bright of orangeskin Lit…

John, for Christmas

On the radio, they were calling it “snow-mageddon.” Joan had seen it on the news, as well, in a Doppler radar swirl that looked like a green hurricane, pulsing like a sick heart over the Cascade Mountains. The worst of it was supposed to hit tomorrow, midday, but already the snow had begun to fall…

The Cat

The old cat turns by curving what’s left of his body beyond the careless trees. Does it ache, each twinge and cramp, to wander in hunger, ever fruitless at eye level? Across the lawn the sunlight has nearly given up dragging out its whites like a chapel veil, faking away its sullied past, having come…

Park Bench

Behind the bench the Drive, before the bench the River. Behind the bench, white lights approaching east and west become red lights receding west and east while before the bench, there are paved and unpaved pathways and a grassy field, the boathouse, and the playground, and the gardens of a park named for a man…

Joyriders

Because nights on the third shift seem to stretch longer than they should, and because sleeping through the day has been giving him nightmares, Jimmy Barnes buys coffee at the truck stop on Sugar Hill Road. He circles the place once before parking. In the big lot out back, the tractor-trailers are lined in rows,…

Making Small Talk, the Cashier at the Grocery Store Inadvertently Creates a Religion

Passing the pears over the electronic scanner, she says These are beautiful. Look at the markings! And: I don’t know the story of where they’re from. But I believe they are just right. And passing the figs: So complex, what’s on the inside. Everything worthwhile has a kind of mystery. I don’t bother with it…

Stone Church

A space to rise in, made from what falls, from the very mass it’s cleared from, cut, carved, chiseled, fluted or curved into a space there is no end to at night when the stained glass behind the altar could be stone too, obsidian, or basalt, for all the light there is.   At night,…