“If ever, oh ever a Wiz there was, The Wizard of Oz is one because—double-time!— because-because-because!” Mania does liven up a song. We detoured for candy cigarettes. My old pastime— I smoked; he sang the entire score. Dad was well, so he got visitation. It had been—I’d lost track of time— a year? He launched…
Pulling out government coupons for the first time In a Krogers twelve blocks from her walk up So the bagboys and cashiers and seniors Browsing tabloids would all be strangers, She’s slow motion through and past their stares. She feels every nuance of her body As a tense repressed trembling, a calculated Conscious stepping, just…
Think of a lizard as a spot of day-glo green, insect-sized, though in all ways perfect. Lost in this kitchen of chrome-souled recipes for oblivion, he looks hard at me. His skin, my skin, our heartbeats tight with trauma, I carry him out where, tack-sharp, two green push-ups, and a cool survey of the universe,…
Some people think travel is unsafe. They don’t trust the aeronautic logic of planes, and they think the rest of the earth is more bloody and troubled and roiling than wherever they’re from. I’d never been one of those people, though I taught a course called Patterns of Civic Unrest in the Post-Colonial World…
After the funeral, after friends and distant relatives departed, and the house, once again, grew quiet, we opened closets and bureau drawers and packed away in boxes dresses, shoes, the silk underthings still wrapped in tissue. We sorted through cedar chests of linens and lace, the quilts she had sewn sitting by the window on…
There are some things I should tell you beforehand: I was born on a bed covered quickly with a quilt. I stepped my bare feet into the new world of a lamp-lit room in the country. Because of a broken driveshaft we stayed, my mother and I, among the witch-hazel straddled houses and the buzzard-heavy…
The riddle of the garden is the garden. The hollyhocks, chest-high, their irresponsible profligacy. The nethering stonecrop. The wax in which the body walks. The fragrance kneeling at the lily’s mouth. The story that is the lily, the fragrance; the peonies, their exfoliate hives. The weavers in their close huts of wattle hurl questions at…
We were the News-of-the-World Theater Collective, moving from city to city together; we were all married to each other and to the idea of what you could pull from the streams of the news that ran over and around and through our lives. We wanted no one to ever again let that information splash over…
Today I started looking for my soul. Yesterday it was my keys. Last week, my brain which I couldn’t find, it being out looking for me, now that I’m getting so old. First I thought my soul would have gone back to Greece where she grew so tall and straight, she thought she was…
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