Dipped in the batter of the personal, adrift in its thick glisten, she gave up ambition and dyed her hair blond-on-black for her post-post-feminist project. Personal experiences are chains, balls, iron filings drawn fatally to the magnetic personality. Once she bore the leashes and tourniquets of the personal; stuffed herself deep into the nooses of…
In September of 1965, when I was eighteen years old, I traveled from London, England, where I was living, to Hamburg, West Germany, with my friend Carl Jurgen Kurtz. Carl was twenty. We’d met at a boarding house in Chelsea I’d lived in for a few weeks after I’d first arrived in London, and where…
My father bars the door, bars harm From this house, and it is years. —Louise Glück, “Gretel in Darkness” I was fearless under the firmament, the starry dark my first education in freedom. It was my last. On the second night— when there were no guiding stones— it was clear: the expanse was a cold…
He was the first person I knew who spoke to God and to whom God replied. And he was the first person I knew who had written the great works of whomever you might name— mine own T. S. Eliot—though he affected no accent and wore a shrunken Grateful Dead T-shirt. It was not only…
Ach—the gravitas of the hunt. I. Digestive turned blue so the woman said. Said, I write my own islands, and red, red. Was urinary. Under the astigmatic lens of her naked eye she followed the tracts. Looking at worms for a long time she said A worm in its lifetime moves short distances. She knew…
What gets out: I would be for you like fog, those puddles of mist settling in the valleys cars steer through nighttime, mid-Pennsylvania, staking their slow headlights on clouds nestled deep in the pits between mountains. When your tongue wanders, dropping indiscreetly its lexicon, as a drunk lady ignores the slipping strap of her…
Being red is the color of a white sun where it lingers on an arm. Color of time lost in sparks, of space lost inside dance. Red of walks by the railroad in the flush of youth, while our steps released the squeaks of shoots reaching for the light. Scarlet of sin, crimson of fresh…
"Do be sure, dearie, that you get the plain yogurt for your father. I brought home vanilla by mistake last week, and he was ready to call out the constabulary." "Entendu," Eleanor called back, straightening her collar in front of the spotted mirror in the hall. How like her mother to use the phrase…
Late dinner at a dark café blocks from Rittenhouse Square, iron pots of mussels and Belgian beer and a waiter eager to snag the check and clock out. Such are the summer pleasures of his work—winding down to a glass of red wine, catching the windowed reflection of a girl as she passes, counting the…
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