What gets out: I would be for you like fog, those puddles of mist settling in the valleys cars steer through nighttime, mid-Pennsylvania, staking their slow headlights on clouds nestled deep in the pits between mountains. When your tongue wanders, dropping indiscreetly its lexicon, as a drunk lady ignores the slipping strap of her…
Being red is the color of a white sun where it lingers on an arm. Color of time lost in sparks, of space lost inside dance. Red of walks by the railroad in the flush of youth, while our steps released the squeaks of shoots reaching for the light. Scarlet of sin, crimson of fresh…
"Do be sure, dearie, that you get the plain yogurt for your father. I brought home vanilla by mistake last week, and he was ready to call out the constabulary." "Entendu," Eleanor called back, straightening her collar in front of the spotted mirror in the hall. How like her mother to use the phrase…
Late dinner at a dark café blocks from Rittenhouse Square, iron pots of mussels and Belgian beer and a waiter eager to snag the check and clock out. Such are the summer pleasures of his work—winding down to a glass of red wine, catching the windowed reflection of a girl as she passes, counting the…
It started with herrings, which he ate with warm black bread as a child, and ended with two pigs, the forbidden. It started with the strict dietary laws of his father, a pious Jew, a mender, and ended with ulcers, which he disobeyed. He was snubbed by a bouquet of colorful flowers on a balcony…
“Quickly or slowly I will go.” —Jean Genet, 1954 My brother is busy packing for jail. I sit on his bed and watch him set aside a blank notebook, pen, copy of Genet’s Thief’s Journal. Jean Genet did some of his best writing in prison, he tells me. I want to say, He was a…
“Lie down beside me,” I whispered. So we lay on the bed in that room that was the whole world to us. Outside, the innkeeper’s children kicked a soccer ball along the quay. Seagulls flocked and dispersed, and the busy foolish world went about its foolish business. I shut my eyes and we met on…
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.
Li Po, this is your invite to the Prop Stop, a honky-tonk unreachable except by boat where we’d tether to a buoy and then, barefoot or in flip-flops, tightrope across a rug of skiffs, two weekenders not looking for trouble but ready to battle any slurs the hicks unleash. I keep samurai toothpicks and wine…
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