Two weeks after her husband’s death, just before I left for the airport, my mother said, But how will I get to the lawyer’s on time tomorrow? I said Well you’ll leave the house in plenty of time, she said No no, how will I wake up in time? You’ll set the alarm, Mom, and…
They lived in Tennessee for five months. George had wanted to move there to play guitar, an idea he seized on late one night, in the hopeful, dreamy fog of too much youth and too many beers. When promise is like a drug, the stars are supernatural, water is glass. There, in the bedroom, he…
When I am the lone listener to the antiphony of crickets and the two wild tribes of cicadas and let my mind wander to its bogs, its sloughs where no endorphins fire, I will think on occasion how all memory is longing for the lost energies of innocence, and then one night— whiskey and the…
When my mother turned sixty, she kissed the invisible stars on the foreheads of her two grown men and deemed them worthy stars The sky, a vaulted blue dome, empties itself and fills Pyongyang with quick, fluid stars Tonight, longing fans out like a silk curtain over an empty room; a girl’s eyes burn…
Once there was a woman who was asked by a stranger to carry a foreign object with her onto a plane: When the stranger approached her, the woman was sitting at the edge of her chair a few feet from the gate out of which her plane was scheduled to leave. Her legs were crossed….
Bored, I open the back of an ancient clock And the minutes pile out, Exhausted from spinning Out the same hammered seconds. The minutes stagger on the table And collapse, for they are dizzy, For they have realized they have no legs, For the surface of the table is flat And what have they known…
The boy could sometimes see, could sense his father’s fondness for a thing. One Christmas he spurned comic books, penciled “shotgun” on his list to prove he’d moved beyond the tin cans and the .22. En route to the rite of deer, perhaps hunt birds…like tiny planes; safe in a blind, he’d take his time…
Mitchell’s daughter, who was twelve, accused him of loving his books but hating his customers. He didn’t hate them. He just didn’t like having to chat with them, or lead them to very clearly marked sections (if they couldn’t read signs, why were they buying books?) while they complained that nothing was arranged by title….
The world is always burning, you should fly from the burning if you can, and you should hold your head oh either above or below the dust and you should be careful in the blocks of Bowery below or above the Broome that always is changing from one kind of drunkenness to another for that…
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