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Closely Held

Molly’s father was a physicist, and not the garden-variety kind. He had been in one of Orion’s college textbooks as the Eisenstat Principle of something or other. Matter? Motion? Orion didn’t remember, although it was assumed he knew which. The Eisenstats assumed many things. "I take it the two of you are planning to get…

Coelacanth

Once thought to be extinct . . . lives at depths of up to 1,500 feet . . . dies of shock when brought to the surface . . . almost nothing is known about it . . . —National Geographic I saw you in a book: bubble-eyed and staring, mouth spookily aglow with a…

Ghosts

Out on the front lawn, Melinda was weeding her father’s garden with a birdlike metal claw when a car drifted up to the curb. A man with brown hair highlighted with blond streaks got out on the driver’s side. He stood still for a moment, staring at the house as if he owned it and…

Conversation

1 He said it would always be what might have been, a city about to happen, a city never completed, one that disappeared with hardly a trace, inside or beneath the outer city, making the outer one— the one in which we spend our waking hours— seem pointless and dull. It would always be a…

The Deer

are tentative. Of course. To be an animal is to watch. Is to think about eating all the time. I watch them be so watchful. My window takes them one by one through trees winter strips down to a few species.                              When I saw the deer, I was beginning to type, not it came…

Dead of the Night

  For once, no flowers. Past midnight, and very quiet along this corridor. The clock on the opposite wall is round, a cartoon clock. Funny, the idea of keeping time, here of all places. Beneath the clock, a square tablet announces in bold what is now the wrong date, April 3.    I could walk…

The Earth

translated from the French by Anne Atik Small crystal globe, Earth’s small globe, Through you I see My lovely glass bowl. We’re all locked up In your hard strict breast But so polished, so glossed Rounded by light. Like this horse running Or a lady who halts Or the flower on her dress A child…

My Poetry Professor’s Ashes

remembering Lem Norrell All those rhetorical contraptions of the metaphysicals prying us loose from the world!                     And those licentious exhortations to squeeze the day! Something about the Anglican burial brought those back, and with them your voice rousing those     metaphors off the page. It’s not like I didn’t get a heads-up, right? But…