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  • Termites: An Assay

    So far the house still is standing. So far the hairline cracks wandering the plaster still debate, in Socratic unhurry, what constitutes a good life. An almost readable language. Like the radio heard while traveling in a foreign country— you know that something important has happened, but not what.

  • Orpheus Again

    And so he descended into memory, which might as well have been the afterlife, because he hoped that she was there, waiting for him to take her back from wherever the past had abandoned her to, and lo! she was there in all the glow and splendor only memory affords, and such impossible perfection, how…

  • Queequeg’s Tattoos: A Headless Mask

    He speaks a farewell kiss to me. —Bob Dylan Pagan psalmody singing his checkered face into my sleep, tomahawk at our side, head in the bag. Ready                                  to venture out against the colorless light, slandering a white gaze. That’s all it takes to find the world on                                  its bow, turn a wheel against…

  • Say When

                 Swingmatism    |     You hear a bird sing, you don’t try to understand.                          Sissle    |     Listen to anything long enough it’ll tell you your life.                            Tiny    |     Pine siskin, dickcissel, longspur, purple finch, lark sparrow, wheatear, winter wren, waterthrush, veery.                Ornithology    |     Bird dream felt like fell from the nest, felt like…

  • Breaking the Spell

    We were young again. Sex as an act of reverence was not yet even imaginable. There was no such thing . . . The point was to push eventually past mere distraction, to achieve an effacement entirely of what, inside us, we couldn’t bear looking long at, no, not a moment longer, what was pleasure…

  • Blues

    I’ve slipped out early from the Jersey summer home where my family’s vacationing with Auntie Liz and Uncle Duke, whose black Lincoln stinks of cigar, and who, Dad says, is “rich as Crease-us,” who Dad says is “rich as Crease-us.” Fog squirms inside me as I squinch across the sand, gripping my four-foot fishing rod:…

  • In the Old Firehouse

    I decided that we were in the old firehouse after some kind of fire, undressing, and the feeling was the same old feeling, that is everyone wanted to get drunk, but we could not do that, so we undressed heavily and breathed heavily, each breath a full pint, and I sat on a stool beside…

  • Saint Helene

    In February, when the snow comes down hard, little globes of light are left along Route 23, not the side where the Arco station is, but on the other side, which slopes off when a driver least expects it. The lights are made out of paper bags and sand and candles, and they burn past…