The women said, “You wished the rain on us and now you are leaving.” They kept the rain and I left. The muck of that place stayed on my shoes for a mile and then it was a new road with a sour mud and red cliffs and a wind better than a sweetheart….
The intervention is not Marilyn’s idea, but it might as well be. She is the one who has talked too much. And she has agreed to go along with it, nodding and murmuring an all right into the receiver while Sid dozes in front of the evening news. They love watching the news. Things are…
In the dream there’d been difficulty— tidal wave topside while elsewise the cat had to be taken away and left yet again on a farm framed by a row of small houses. A tangled mass hissed and we woke and went on and found a pay phone, called the weather station. Wondered what was for…
Every shadow spoke. They listened to the words until they inhabited them, had them on the tongue and in the brain, where we, who do not act, reside. In that image-making niche, they appeared to be like us: a simulacrum so perfect it hurt. They could take us in and give us out like any…
Shame is my sister. She’ll have no niece. Agree in me a tenancy of junction and a process of elimination. One has promises and room for whom to keep herself. A pinkening vibe, as from exit light in other halls, mother-runs this cloister of disavowal, and in the sobbed-inside cells locked to mine I imagine…
When I was young our winter-wear wouldn’t have permitted anyone to look sexy. The look then was like the inflated figures in a Macy’s parade, puffy and down-stuffed, colorful rubber boots, with pompons on the hats our mothers knitted, matching mittens hanging on yarn from our coat sleeves. Fashion then didn’t have in mind sprinting…
1 September There was nothing outside our town to warn you of its coming. One second you weren’t there and the next you were. It was more than a post office and more than a village, but it had no sprawl, it had no outskirts. The town huddled close together for protection, the desert everyone…
My aunt Leticia could be counted on to explain the family mysteries. She’d forget I didn’t know something and drop it into conversation, or use the occasion of having a fever—or being ill in any way—to let down her defenses and tell me things I hadn’t been told. Sometimes the words flew out of her…
for Bill Handley We have only the Book of the Infinite to guide us and how we interpret its unthinkable premise: this life then an afterlife. At the end of his, he saw blue. I was told this. Eyes upturned drawing the sky into one extended remembrance of a present. I was told…
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