The Spanish Steps: Keats Departing He hated that he could no longer taste the thick risotto, the paved rosetta rolls soft on the inside, cool globes of fruit plucked from ashy soil, the quivering curd cheese and leafy Puglian greens. All sustenance—even his Chianti’s terroir— mocked him. And so, after weeks of this effrontery, he…
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 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…
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…
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,…
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…
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,…
We constructed a sign and planted it in the park in the center of town. Future Site of the First National Bank of the Grand Duchy of New Brunswick. As best as anyone could remember, Stephen came up with the idea itself. Lisa added “New Brunswick.” Donna contributed “Grand Duchy.” She’d read it in the…
Anger doesn’t catch the light like laughter, but with my friend it seems to crowd him, seems to complicate his neck and jaw. It’s not just that. It’s made him fat. We’ve only walked two blocks and he’s wheezing when we reach Walgreens. A wind-fixed scent of diesel passes. I hate my job, he says,…
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