Every time I looked out the window, there was a different kind of light. I remember other things, of course but it is the only thing I felt in that blinding way. In the pain, I said, What is the happiness? I’ve never been so pure, I said . . . felt it to open…
All my life before him, every word I wrote had heard the notes turning into air above the pages and spinning my desire into jail and joy, or memory of someone not quite gone. Like children in the womb or eggs asleep in a girl’s all possible, the words I gave to paper heard whatever…
for Stanley Plumly Today, putting on my socks, I noticed, on my right foot, an ugly bunion and sore hammertoes. Overnight, it seemed, my alphabet of 26 bones, 100 ligaments, and 33 muscles had realigned themselves into the jumbled sentence of my mother’s right foot. How did my mother’s foot suddenly become part of me?…
Lemon light, curd of worry. My eye is all iris. Look through this small viewer to penetrate the black shaft. Who’s this? Who’s that? Green goes to yellow over there. The eye wants to be investigated privately. I’ve lost my sense of humor, vitreous jelly, a small island floating under a dark mood; the eye…
They are not lilacs, though their thousand blue torches rise up everywhere on our boulevard and ignite Spring. I have eyes. I know what I see. A symbol of something like love, conflated with that delicate bruise color. Desert blue, arroyo blue, pool shimmer, blue of the jay’s wing gliding south above the aircraft plants….
It was through our friend Shirley that we met the Kalowski boys. I was eleven that summer, and my sister, Lila, was thirteen. Shirley used to live in the hollow down below us, but had recently moved up the road, where the houses were more populous, closer to the hard road and the still faraway…
Against an empty sky, the elm is feathered with gold like some apparent wing. On the dark avenue, people pass, lifting their collars. Through the lit windows, empty stairwells and still pianos. Sparrows drive their hearts into grass. The moon pulls aside its curtain as if someone is peering there. Solitude could not find a…
Wyatt Ingalls and Esther Markham had separately been hired to bid at auction on Church Owl. They had never met. Their assigned seats were next to each other. The auctioneer, Reginald Avery, had just said, "—splendid Church Owl." From the auctioneer’s right, a tall woman of age twenty-two, with an aurora of dark red hair,…
I have never, but for that first night with Vivienne, vomited in the back of a taxi. Vivienne moved into what had been my brother Ethan’s room in my rent-controlled apartment in New York. I firmly believe rent-control laws prohibit gainfully employed art gallery assistants and copy editors and salesgirls at Banana Republic from living…
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