Not really knowing the difference between herons and cranes, that summer we named the two birds that came to Boehmke’s Cove (which were almost surely not cranes but herons because of the way they flew with their heads drawn in close to their bodies, and for their topknot crests of feathers) “Stephen Crane” and “Hart…
If I bisect my head what grasslands might I find, what flecks of plaster what walls. What genuflects cracks to these streets, vacant lots. There was a sandal, a child standing in it, & dust. Each sequence a leather strap creasing. Each crossroads with arrowsigns, distances, placenames crossed out. There was a tollbooth…
When Paul Loy was ten years old, watching the movers unload the Allied Van Lines truck at his family’s new house in upstate New York, all the white kids on Ableman Avenue materialized. When his parents told him he’d have to learn to get along, even though he didn’t understand the concept of passing, that…
This subway map reminds me of the colored stripes on hospital floors that guide us to recovery or dead ends (I lift my glass to the Amber line), or the spacious room that overlooks a beautiful parking lot where the roofs of the cars are like tiles you’ll be walking on in the same sunshine,…
Old woman on the rocks you look so happy. I’ve been dying to tell someone I have no past but we share no common lexis for that. And anyway you don’t need to know more— everyone is eager to be empty. This is a nice breeze so let’s just sit here a while growing fonder…
a novel excerpt Well OK, let’s see: start with the climactic moment and my father wearing his regulation State Trooper iridescent mirror shades so I could see a pair of shrunken images of myself but not his eyes and he stood there in the marl-paved parking lot beside his truck with the red light still…
This is how the day begins: Badly. Bleary and bloated and many other b-words. There’s vomit on the blanket and he’s not sure whose. Maybe the dog, Barkley? A bottle on the nightstand, a butt in the tray with a dead two-inch ash. The boiler is broken again, the shower bitterly cold. The driveway? Blocked—call…
He’s made me smaller, taken fingernails and spoken words that leave me awake on the outskirts of this town where plum trees don’t give and dogs, chained to their houses with rope, are shot through with silver. His sisters battered down the door with a hatchet and a telescope they bought at a yard sale….
James Alan McPherson mocks the Horatio Alger aspect of his background via the young writer-narrator of his first published story, “Gold Coast” (an Atlantic Monthly First in 1968), in a passage where Robert dreams that “there would be capsule biographies of my life on dust jackets of many books, all proclaiming: ?…He knew life on…
No products in the cart.