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:…
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…
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…
Around that time, the city grew quiet. You said Don’t hurt me and I said If I was going to hurt you I’d have done it already. We passed a dying store with gem-like windows. A door that banged in the wind. You said Let me go. As in a film of the apocalypse, a…
Already, his abdomen was sculpted, and already the thin trail descending from beneath his belly button. Even now it is difficult to explain it. I was, after all, only 7; I didn’t even know what Turkish meant. In the dead of winter, which only meant certain flowers had ceased blooming on the island, we had…
Swallows, phoebes, flycatchers, chickadees, warblers, and some terns and sparrows are less than an ounce, and are so little of water, more hollow than bone, though of substance in boughs and leaves, where they perch and fly, for how little they want of what matters, bright and unmistakable—aspiring, disappearing—not of who they are but of…
What happened of course was nothing extraordinary except for the bracelet she found in her mailbox—a breakfast of flat red stones, the painted smash of a river bottom. The river, she liked to imagine, in Africa, in Tanzania, in Dar es Salaam. The Rufiji, perhaps, for she is touching a map now and dreaming of…
Now I see it: a few years To play around while being Bossed around By the taller ones, the ones With the money And more muscle, however Tender or indifferent They might be at being Parents; then off to school And the years of struggle With authority while learning Violent gobs of things one didn’t…
She is unnaturally educated. Can take a word, crosshair it into place and begin its trajectory toward l’ancien. Greek, Latin, hieroglyphics. Whatness is concerned with content. So many private horrors stink of kerosene, bloodsport. Whereness is concerned with linkages. We begin almost demented by the Big Bang accuracy of metaphor. And the Word was ….
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