Kids in the Dumb Class weren’t allowed to enroll for French So instead we learned the difference between ser and estar. A yellow-haired midget father in a white suit cursed me for being In his family tent-yard, where I had wandered. He was my size. All a misunderstanding, we weren’t that stupid. I was earning…
A Romance Novel in Ten Short Chapters Chapter One One day—taken by the lilt of his wrists and the most beautiful hands she had ever seen on a man—she impetuously threw in her lot with a deaf and dumb mechanic who’d been deaf and dumb from birth. She fell in love as she was watching…
Color of a two-day new bruise, pored and faintly fuzzed like the pad of a dog’s paw. Skin so thin faucet water risks rubbing through to moony fruit, the shape and pitless-centered weight of testes. No stone, too malleable so, not a drupe. Dropped, it wobbles to find plumb center, comes to rest on star-shaped…
With my jade and pebbled hide, my fleas and magnificent talons, Why have I long cooped under this iron bridge in Kittanning on the Allegheny? See the green-bottle flies over the giant catfish rotting on a rock, General Armstrong’s hoofed men swarming down a hillside with smoke. I want you to notice how thin my…
The yellow eye and needle beak of that black bird, because the tree is swaying—look, it’s saying I, I’m staying. Reports from the south and west come far worse, where of course they understand the danger, who chose danger in that form and not another, though it must seem unfair, disproportionate, how that balance of…
Porco cane! Another day breaks with a gunshot and a chorus of yelping bloodhounds after boar. I ache to join in, but stay quiet, loyal dog-pig that I am. Pig-dog. Purebred cur in a pen: Sono io. The hunt’s trained out of me. Bark and growl, the baser instincts, I renounced them long ago. My…
Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, The Art of Falconry 1. Of the oil gland . . . Of the down . . . Of the numbers and arrangement of feathers in the wing . . . I have seen on the plains of Apulia how the birds in earliest spring were weak and scarcely able to…
“There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.” —Edward Abbey The horizon gutted, skinned, unfurled and dried like a diamondback, no secrets, no secret sea cave stash, so evident it all seems invisible: fissures in the orange San Andreas, smoking asphalt on a runaway go-cart, 100% clear…
She is standing in the doorway of the barn loft, swaying backwards and forwards. Both her hands are over her head and flat against the inside of the lintel; her heels come off the floor on her forward motion, and she keeps her toes down on her backward motion, curling them around the rough…
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