A section of the newspaper, rolled into a tight cone and flaming at the top, stuck out of the cook’s ear the first time I saw him. This was early June, in Corpus Christi, Texas, when I was sixteen and had been hired as the delivery driver for La Cocina Mexican Restaurant. The cook was…
Put your pain on one side, it is unwelcome tonight, we have guests, dinner is to be served, the pain must wait. I am sorry, do not be angry, do not hate, put your pain away for a more convenient day. The telephone rang with need, your hurt was huge, it was not unrecognized, but…
You are never what you seem. Like barbeque, you tell me time doesn’t matter, that all things wait. You take long as it takes. Wife to worry, you can sit forever, stewing, grown angrier by the hour. Like ribs you are better the day after, when all is forgiven. Death’s daughter, you are often cross—bitter…
She was in her early twenties, five or six years younger than me. She moved with a catlike suppleness through our dull office space (scratchy fabric of cubicle walls, coiled wires, the kitchen with its empty Pepsi cans assembled into a shaky pyramid for future recycling). She wore skirts—nobody in our office wore skirts—short, flared…
I turned sixty in Paris last year. We stayed at the Lutetia, where the Gestapo headquartered during the war, my wife, two boys, and me, and several old Vietnamese ladies carrying poodles with diamond collars. Once my father caught a man stealing cigarettes out of one of his vending machines. He didn’t stop choking him…
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…
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