Bully for you, you made Glee Club. A trumpet voluntary for you!— but the Safety Patrol monitor lizard ruffles around to me when I call. You made high C, the suicide note. Attention-getter!—a smattering stirs the bleachers & I too murmur up a platitude as it ruffles around to me. Glee Club folds away scales…
She’d grown tired, she admitted, of the picturesque— pretty pipers piped against a backdrape of pineapple yellow. She closed her eyes to it and it went away. In this sight heaven she trilled her right hand in the water-lilied water and wondered at the weather. Twenty starlings twittered. The day had been dieted down to…
We are not surprised, those of us who are made, we’ve been told, in God’s image, that our God, who has not tissue nor tail, is a jealous God. What makes us snappish, after all, about God is impeccability but if jealousy makes us also Godlike—and if that’s where our love turned wrong— then there…
Bare trees in front of brown buildings. A pale dry wreath. The bright red ribbon hanging and broken stands for all this century’s cruelty. The street is quiet. Mammoth fog spreads along the ground. The ribbon should be enormous, the road should be made of ribbon, the trees swathed, the babies swaddled. Men should open…
From a spoon to a city —Ernesto N. Rogers, designer, 1900–1969 In the useless pages of Domus, the trade journal of utilitarian interiors, no one’s friend sits on foam, having postconsumption microevents in series, in unsudden red contexts, in the crook of luxury. The dial was big and lobotomy-white wardrobe doors, blaring like mimes in…
Pursued by her suitor and he, by her father: one appears monstrous, the other no bigger than her thumb. Parallax, paradox, open the locks. She nailed her shadow to the fork of a tree against pursuit. Two knives crossed put a hex on the table. She read disaster ahead: three swans flying together, an infant…
Ann Beattie, Perfect Recall, stories: Eleven perfect stories from the winner of the 2000 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. Beattie defined the zeitgeist of the seventies and eighties, and now she deftly places her baby-boomers in the uneasy, comic confusion of middle-age. (Scribner)
Just give me a second to leap from your path each time your need to run me down speeds up, your just-hit-thirteen split- second shattered glass brilliance spilled. I’ve had to extricate you from yourself, to hoard each shard of hope, refusing your oceanic effusions, to find an inland calm where I can slowly wind…
When was the last time you blew your nose on a morning glory? Toddler sister picked the morning glory—but not to do this, but to do that. Squatting in the woods— the broad soft leaf, always most welcome. Your devout prayer is answered when the broad leaf …
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