Here in this little town in Pennsylvania where I spend half the week and the whole long summer, we are urged to buy local. This is a pleasure, not a duty or a difficulty. The rewards are multiple: sticking it to the multinationals, high quality merchandise, real personal exchanges. Becoming known. The place in town…
They drink their cocktails in the calm manner of their middle years, while the dim lights around the swimming pool make shadows of that world they’ve almost fully entered. Like Yeats’ wild swans their uneven number suggests at least one of them is no longer mated. Added up, their several ages are short of a…
Mrs. Greed had been married for forty years, her husband the cuckold of all time. A homely man with a notable fortune, he escorted her on errands in the neighborhood. It was a point of honor with Mrs. Greed to say she would never leave him. No matter if her affection for him was surpassed…
Sing a song of sixpence a pocket full of rye, Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie. When the pie was opened the birds began to sing, On TV the Bizarre Foods host leans over a rickety market stall in Bangkok. He picks at the toothpick bones of a sparrow, licks his lips and…
Her kitchen is filled with the neighbors’ dishes—all well-meaning, pity-stained, uncleaned. She can’t quite think, so she shuffles about the house, marveling at the strangeness. Touching the bill pile, a bruised spot in the oak banister, his fleece jacket on a coat rack, the cannon-shaped back of a wedding gift mixer, the crumbling scone on…
We are all intruders here though we fool ourselves this late winter day, carving a place on the banks to anchor our heels. We stretch over the water, hoping to slip onto the wings of a Great Blue Heron but afraid to get caught in the trap of reeds, twisting in the…
Maybe your baby done made some other plans. —Stevie Wonder Out of a cinched sack of bones, the dog’s half-cast opiate eyes ask can’t you hear the moths, pelting the pear glass? & then there is nothing else I can hear, bulbs opal and ignited as felted anus-stars of snow spot the porch, blast the…
I am sitting behind a desk, not my desk, maybe your desk, watching the clock. That woman who works in the next cubicle has her radio tuned to NPR. “All Things Considered” has come on. This is good, this means that we are getting toward the end of things. The work day, I mean. On…
has become one knotted rope one breath of cabbage soup one foot on the cobblestone— a thousand banners—no—one flag flapping its red letters into a satin tatter because this is the century of slivers and scraps—beauty of the dustbin—the crowd knows that nothing good can follow from that other prettiness —the slick summer palaces of…
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