Article

  • To Zeno

    You with your equation, an arrow plugs your heart, half in half out makes nowhere at all. You won’t admit it but what’s left is time: a patient sponge to stop your arrow from bleeding. It isn’t more years I want, just some older days. If a day had four hours more I think I…

  • Contact Sheet

    Her studious efforts to construct and maintain partitions as between varieties of touch, which appeared as the blur between affection and sexuality, were rigorous in proportion to the real absence of boundaries designated by these terms. While the contrast was not sharp, it was still painful. Like trying to pry physiology apart from feeling: once…

  • from ULULU (Shrapnel Scenes)

    (Her Anniversary Page Opera—Continues) The curtain shivers on stage boards—dirty gas on the bare back dust under cover of horse, cloth—darkness to the bristles—broom for a rug over a century (late of sawdust   coal ash   all stagehands on deck) all rugs from the wings (hand to handing off)   rugs   unrolling another’s land another lands—a splash…

  • Rue Monge Narrated

    Up or down it, disguise and discretion go both ways. Indifferent to tone, peeling paint adds cachet: patina proudly worn as uniform. Varnish sweats like skin in the stair. Concierge behind lace curtains waits for deliverance. Who cares if care has stained her age? Even spring is autumnal: pallor of sun and leaf on café…

  • Graphology

    Whenever she met someone, she secretly analyzed their handwriting. She wondered if these insights were illicitly gained, like wiretapping, but reasoned that graphology was merely close attention to the person without the distraction of interaction. Each element of the psyche had its equivalent mark on paper: the dominant upper zone of one friend indicated spirituality,…

  • Young Collectors’ Day

    i. In the year that Johann Pike turned seventy he had been the Executive Director of the Chicago Antiquarian Society for over thirty years. His offices were housed, along with the rest of the Society, in Blackthorne Hall, which was located six blocks from the center of the University of Chicago, where Johann’s father had…

  • Walk Right In

    All summer and fall the couple floats hand in hand from work at the shelter workshop. Hand in hand in their secondhand sleeveless oxford shirts. With target tattoos on their deltoids. Even in the winter, the same way, hand in hand, although bundled up in secondhand wool coats. One snowy evening, right after they pass…