translated by Clare Cavanagh He dressed in black, like a clerk at an insurance bureau who specializes in lost causes. I’d spot him on Urzednicza rushing for a streetcar, and at Krzysztofory as he solemnly discharged his duties, receiving other artists dressed in black. I dismissed him with the pride of someone who’s…
Mandy stood in front of the open garage and asked her husband why anybody would ask her over for lunch on a Sunday. Dan was already moving the bicycles, hanging the rakes on a hook, stacking things she didn’t recognize. Maybe this woman wanted to get to know her, be her friend, he said, rolling…
The bedroom slippers’ silk linings. The dressing gown of brocade, stitched with the zodiac. The pajamas underneath also made out of silk, for which how many individuals of the species B. mori, having munched the succulent, pale-green mulberry leaves and insinuated a sack wherein to magnify themselves, were steamed to death from the inside out?…
for Carl Hays Drizzle this morning, but a cool glare in the brain, and I’m staggering again down Cherry Street toward that cratered-out joint on Broadway where one happy night, eons ago, I cut a rug with a hopped-up redhead. Nothing came of that, Carl, except a few short hours of inexplicable…
It all started when Sophie came home from college, between her sophomore and junior years. She wasn’t happy to be back. She’d grown to love Boston, the sad blustery winters, the confusing one-ways and roundabouts, and she felt like she’d outgrown California—its sunny, childlike happiness. Worst of all was her mother. Sophie was an only…
We meet day-plain and inches away, faces facing off in a garden, kissing closed kisses, solemn, bone-dry, and exquisite as the leaves of our sweating faces glisten, sheens giving back each tree’s green. My greenery grows untoward, branches burst windows, menace doors, what sky is wide enough to house me? Breath…
Two and a half weeks after I was born, on July 9th, 1958, the plates that make up the Fairweather Range in the Alaskan panhandle apparently slipped twenty-one feet on either side of the Fairweather fault, the northern end of a major league instability that runs the length of North America. The thinking now…
At the moment when you stop mid-step and look into my eyes, as if at a ship on the horizon, blue sea and sun, and light drains out of the sky and your face is lit by its own sun in the far-off land we will sail to in the boat whose mooring line you…
Chicago Stories Alewives The year the alewives were washing up on the shores of the lake and their stench rose up from the beaches so that even when you couldn’t smell them anymore they stank up your memory. Newly dead they were a silvery blue. In the sun they were like hundreds of mirrors. They…
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