A fire has started in the kitchen, and is moving from room to room. There’s just enough time to save the Rembrandt, an original, or the portrait of your wife. You save the Rembrandt, of course, but when you get outside you think it might be possible to save the portrait as well. You dash…
He lies as still as possible and waits, then opens up his eyes. They’re everywhere. Millions, billions of motes, dead as the fates, hovering in the shafts of the morning air. Detritus of the universe, debris, the cosmic dust, polluted, dying, and dead, an endless sinking suffocating sea of sunlit dust that pins him to…
Let the watchers admit to the terror of being young, and the writers set down on blackboards their fear. It is the people’s right to ask exile or blood, the people’s privilege to eat the cheapest food. While the talk of guns worms into the dreams of the citizens, every schoolyard is the same. Salomé…
“It seems to be the five stages of yeast, not grief, you like to write about,” my son says, meaning that bread is always rising and falling, being broken and eaten, in my poems. And though he is only half serious, I want to say to him “bread rising in the bowl is like breath…
Helen Stetter Born into an age of horse-drawn wagons that knocked and rocked over rutted mud in the hot wake of straw, manure and flies, today she glides to her birthday party in a chair with sparkling carriage wheels, along a lane of smooth gray carpeting that doesn’t jar one petal of the corsage…
One minute I’m standing in the parking lot behind the De Anza theater. We’re throwing our empties at each other, our smokes turning a whiter shade of pale. The subject is horsepower, and the cars we’re leaning on are Cougars, Mustangs, GTOs. Now and then we rumble off and back again for no particular reason….
The house where I grew up burned about thirty years ago. It was situated a few miles north of Loring, near the intersection of two country roads, only one of which was paved when I was a boy. The one we lived on wasn’t, and my dad considered it a major triumph when he managed…
The new guy bought it as a present for his wife (this a story Jim is telling)— like a love swing like I think of as a love swing? Jim uh-huhs: she’ll ride it Christmas morn. So let us stop to praise the new guy’s paunch, the dimpling in his wife’s thighs, though when I…
Go tell the President: the wagon trail was lost out there beyond the sinking sun. The sun dance ended in a leaden hail. The brooks have all forgotten how to run. I found a feather but I lost the bird. I sent out fifty scouts and they returned with word that there would never be…
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