No woman knows the power she holds at fifteen until it’s gone. Long, loose S of the lower back. Inchoate cheekbone, bracelet of wrist. Soap-soft, uncertain fingertip. Dumb curve of the bottom lip, stunned to mute by its own prettiness. I wore a shell-pink dress with a boat neck collar, my long hair back and…
how was it sudden your long death shock fixed black parking lots ramps the bright art in the hallways flagrant flowers a fish tank in the white places one latex glove like petals spilled on the way to or from some room with a horror in it glass coffin rice flour your skin taking on…
The May morning I came to where I was not expected. The May morning hazy with the mad swirl of maple seeds, where you stood blocking the door. “Where is Mom?” My voice lifted innocent as a child’s balloon. My face needy and vacant, the face you’d loved, or someone had…
I asked Johan why he left home and came to America. How sad it can be in winter listening to the wind . . . No wonder that in the dawn in the mist, one by one figures appear among the trees, making their way to the sea. This is the day when the pack-boat…
They heard their mother yell their father’s name, and came from their beds barefoot and squinting. Jeff Driver was in the kitchen. He was crying, and he told them that the bridge on Cascom Mountain Road had washed out. He looked at Kate’s mother and said her name, “Carey.” Then he looked at Kate and…
Sometimes, now, I think of the back of his head as a physiognomy, blunt, rich with facial hair, the elegant stone-wall shapes of the skull like sensing features, as hard to read as surfaces of the earth. He was mysterious to me in his anterior depths, occiput, lambdoid, but known like a loved home outcrop…
I read somewhere that in Kentucky they had to pass a law forbidding a man from marrying his grandmother. It’s the damnedest thing, but I don’t doubt it. I have a cousin there who lives in farm country where the most handsome man is the mortician. Every night Becky prays for a beautiful death so…
Well, another year has passed! And, while it hasn’t been a perfect one, we have survived. Oh, first there was the house burning down—everything ruined: furniture, original artworks, priceless family heirlooms lost because of some sort of electrical short according to the arson squad who, incidentally, interrogated us for 3 months, making damaging allegations to…
“I’ll write a song about nothing at all . . .” —Guillaume IX of Aquataine (1071–1127) When I was young I fell in love with nothing. Nothing had my heart. I was a moody unpleasant youth; even my mother disliked me. What are you brooding about? she’d ask. Nothing I’d answer. For once, she…
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