Cavernous, unpeopled, the theater is empty, but its silence pleases him. He wants to mull his former life over, as water would, until it becomes pure, simple, & smooth—an oval of white quartz in the river’s bed of sand & stones. As a child he had collected such stones, but their luster always seemed to…
translated by Ralph Angel to Manuel Torres, “Niño de Jerez,” who has the body of a Pharaoh Portrait of Silverio Franconetti Between Italian and flamenco, how would that Silverio have sung? The thick honey of Italy, mixed with our lemon, flowed through the deep wail of his siguiriya. His cry was terrifying. The old folk…
If description could outpace effusions of feeling, serif or sans serif, punctuated with dashes and in Amherst, could one say it was a peculiar summer. I tried to like what I’d always liked and tried to get there sooner rather than later. I’d forgotten I liked orange until on a scale of one to ten…
They lived in town, in houses that touched, houses that needed paint, and money for the rent. We never talked of their parents. We didn’t know their families, what they did on Sundays. They were the boys our mothers feared, alien boys, and we the moths drawn to their light. They were the boys who…
Was I the last one waiting? Epochs passed, tides tossed the island twice each day, sometimes a lazy shushing, sometimes violent—then tides would frighten me, countdown clocks striking off the muzzy days and nights. Mosses grew around me—pin cushion, pale shield, old man’s beard. One gray day, walking on the sand, I found a wooden…
a man sitting across from me in a French restaurant in New York City a name is a word is the first form of domestication an explanation of the secret language he spoke with his father in the marketplace in la Villette: lincsé for five francs, larante for forty and the word for money, le…
The sea is clean, unscuffed: it looks convincing, the sun like hearsay slipping into it. Donde están sus padres? a small girl asks me, pink plastic shovel in her fist, the paint of her dress still wet in places. I have no answer, I’m glitter, I’m hardly here. She’s glad and kneels as…
They moved into Silver Glade with a brand new baby, unnamed, although the grandparents had it registered for high school as Clementine Wrentham Farmer. Wrentham was their name and Farmer was the name their daughter, Lina, used when writing the check for the house. Her professional name, to their joy, was still Lina Rose Wrentham….
Paper boat on a dark stream— Put a candle inside the boat and let that stand for woman, and let the water stand for man. Downstream the willow lets down her green tresses. The water sings as it moves, inexorable, past the banks sodden and rank with mud. The candle makes a chapel of light….
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