You take the fragments of the world and put them into boxes, each one smaller than the last. Lock each one. It’s a kind of violence. The blue triangles of your mother’s dress, or the birds that flew backwards that morning. It was an unremarkable day. Flat weather. Repeating cycles of traffic. There was nothing…
In “At the Fishhouses,” Elizabeth Bishop writes-half-playfully-that she’s “a believer in total immersion.” In “Arrival at Santos,” she exchanges the unsatisfying port city for “driving to the interior.” This descent or expedition to the inner life of things has been one of the continuing qualities of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry-neither relinquishing the pleasures of the passing…
1 The girl who martyred her dolls, sending them To heaven to wait for her arrival, Sentenced them to stones or fire or the force Of her hands to tear them, methods she’d learned From the serious, dark nuns who taught her. She would press a pillow over my face To encourage sainthood. “Now,” she…
Her pale square face looks out like Fate— through a dark kerchief clipped under her chin with a narrow, elegant pin; you can make out a white headband under her shawl; her jacket and skirt cut from the same coarse dark cloth. The uneven stitches of her hem hand-sewn— dark leather men’s shoes sticking out….
translated by Laura Rocha Nakazawa That night, the wind was a lament, a daring wound above the voice of the sea. That night, someone called me amid deep darkness to take me to the Melah, the Jewish quarter. Inebriated, I walked, covered in white tulles to protect me from the fine and savage sand. Alone,…
The way, at last, a sloop goes sailorless and bobs at the dock, swathed in darkness, the way waves swell and, swelling, slay themselves— water, whatever you want, I want to want that. A nickel’s in the till, then it’s not, it’s in a pocket, forgotten, and the pocket’s in a laundry chute. A puddle’s…
Never weaned from anger (the stars incline but do not require), left alone she thinks hard thoughts mean as snow at harvest: home is paradise to cats, hell for wives, she thinks, are all babies slippery? boys hate old men, but women despise them: she thinks, bed full of bones, and bad usage aggravates the…
In 2003, Edward Hirsch left his eighteen-year teaching post at the University of Houston and moved to New York City to become the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. At the time, his decision to accept such a position surprised many of his colleagues and students, who knew him as a generous, passionate,…
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…
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