Alice is pushing 40, her sprawling hips so sprawled that when she busts out of the White Rabbit’s House, Lewis Carrol has to play handyman, nailing the door and roof back on. Every time she tries to sneak away through the garden, the path flings her back, like a treadmill going too fast. She crushes…
And this time when she asks, The world will end, won’t it? a black river of crows will be rowing out above you, heavy oilcloth of wings working over slanted roofs, dark tents of sycamore. She will tilt her small head skyward. So that watching her, you could almost glimpse the secret greed of time…
When I was ten (no, younger than that), my mother tried to kill herself (without the facts there can’t be faith). One death or another every day, Tanqueray bottles halo the bed and she won’t wake up all weekend. In the myth book’s color illustration, the poet turns around inside the mouth of hell to…
for my wife, Katherine The film of your brain is a map drawn by conquerors flying the banner of exploration and misnaming all the islands, yet we sail through the clouds swirling in this hemisphere, navigate rivers of silver till we find the white slash circled in red that tells us stroke, hemorrhage, as if…
On that night, years back, we were up until the cardinals started calling. The first one lit out through the leaves before the air went from warm to hot. I remember that the call sounded lonely in the quiet of early morning. But soon, just before it got light, many of them were fussing in…
God works in mysterious ways, Father said, but He’s not half as mysterious as your mother. He said, Let there be light. And there was light. I don’t see anything mysterious about that. He did what He said He’d do. Your mother says, Let’s not be late for the movie. Yet she takes so long…
Jorie Graham is the kind of poet whose life is nothing less than cinematic. She was born in Rome in 1950 and grew up there. Her father, Bill Pepper, was the head of the Newsweek Rome bureau; her mother, Beverly, is a sculptor famous for her totemic structures. As a child, Jorie hid inside old…
He’s on top of her, barely moving, at the swimming hole I’ve called mine for years. Here, to be anything but naked is nearly sacrilegious. In the quick red canyon water sears the dusty plain. My daughter plays, oblivious to them, delicious in her two-year skin, but I can’t not look (and must if I’m…
In a deep socket of an empty acre lot in South Jersey, a wiry boy with dark eyebrows, burnished blond hair, and thick lenses in his glasses is clearing pathways through the milkweeds, trying to preserve as many of the leafy, muscular stalks as he can. He’s working harder than he’s worked in weeks, so…
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