Or: The Story Behind the Failure of the 2003 Radio Salsa 98.1 Semi-Annual Cuban and/or Puerto Rican Heritage Festival The church is quiet except for the nun’s approaching footsteps. You could imagine the sound of the soft soles of her shoes scuffing down the center aisle, coming towards the last pew, barely growing louder as…
after J. Henri Fabre O scribe, miner, pedestrian tracing the page, try eating your house from the inside: fruit-house, dung-house, make it your task to bring forth flowers out of filth as you cage the syllable, force the cadence; grind and pace or mimic your betters under the argot surge— Observe this recluse scarab waxing…
Make room, said he to the haystack. The point is great; take that; your groom arrives. Lie back; spread grass; never a borrower be. Rakes groom, he said, fakes doom—though choosers don’t mind beggars. Said the haystack: It’s a wedding night, so I’ll keep one eye half shut. (Clothes do make the man, said the…
For me, these past few years have been filled with elegies. Allow me one more: this, not for a loved one, but for the Plough & Stars, the Cambridge pub where this very journal was founded. Like much of the Cambridge that had welcomed (or ignored) me—a young writer who had come to town fifteen…
Every village has its rhythm, and every year Templeton’s was the same. Summer meant tourists to the baseball museum, the crawl of traffic down Main Street, even a drunken soprano flinging an aria into the night on her stagger back to the Opera. With fall, the tourists thinned out, and the families of Phillies…
The sun didn’t mind our handing the revolutions back from earth to itself, so we could say and believe once more, It rose this morning. We allowed the horizon’s gray clouds to decide on a pale cerulean sky. Many things we were taking back, giving some away. The Mississippi could keep its rolling on. Twittering…
April 1995 With his ear for a tune and facility with languages, Chaim Traum should have excelled at eavesdropping, but he did not. Something went wrong in the step between deciphering and understanding, a failure to move inside the conversation and string all the fragmented phrases together. His wife was more skilled. Through their daughter’s…
The teleology of what I now perceive. Contraction. Exile. The afternoon we paddled home in two canoes from the end of the lake, the sky programmatic and threatening, the seven of us eager to reenter the domestic space—the raindrops long as spoons, later the guinea pigs discovered huddled under the station wagon, the reformulation of…
Hank says: "Pan Am is run by the CIA, you know." He says: "There’s trouble brewing here. Out there." He points with his chin. "In the sugar cane fields. In the jungle." He says: "Hemingway knows. He knows all about it." Clara says nothing. She is thinking that she can’t even get this one thing…
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