And up and down the ragged coast gulls draft on the high blue airs, coast the underside of the nimbus drifting past reach, big as a bus on a high and skinny road. Wave goodbye. It is leaving now. Waive any right to see it again. The bright stars, the prickly stars, gain on the…
I lost a tooth in a bloody fight. Was it with Murphy or his half-brother Cutler? Afterwards we searched for it among gum wrappers rolled in tight little balls— had someone waited nervously for a lover? I found two matching buttons and Murphy a Victory dime he claimed was beyond price. I hoped he’d make…
1st Johanna just wants to fuck baseball players. Baseball. She harbors no lust for the thunder boys of basketball. “Freaks of nature, glandular giants, scary,” she explains. “It’d be awful, like having sex with a kayak.” Football players don’t arouse her either. “God, no! Sadistic ogres. They should be out tolling cathedral bells or guarding…
Today: This man is serious. He has put a map of the Mall in my hands and is now insisting that after meeting with the media at the Washington Monument, the parade/demonstration must be routed to the White House for a final statement. “You’re crazy,” I shout above the other voices, a strategy I learned…
I would teach you how to play this instrument which is a little like a violin and something like a flute but diaphanous as watercolor without the pigment but you don’t pay attention . . . When I tell you to count you stare out the window: what could be there if not an immense…
The radio voice speaks in French and so does the other radio voice. Kill the radio and the wind gets hot. In Wolf Point, the Sioux waitress with blue eyes and a figure like a bar of soap lets you change your order, but Delores won’t like it, she says. “Oh, I need about a…
The heart shifts shape of its own accord—from bird to ax, from pinwheel to budded branch. It rolls over in the chest, a brown bear groggy with winter, skips like a child at the fair, stopping in the shade of the fireworks booth, the fat lady’s tent, the corn-dog stand. Or the heart is an…
In late afternoon I sit on the porch, which is mostly rotted to the ground. The screen door’s got cardboard laid in and the rock chimney leaks mortar like a pastry filling. The roof is more sky than shingle. At sixteen years old I wanted to be far away, and by seventeen I was long…
Memory of him begins in my mouth; finger whet red with Chianti, slicked around the rim of a glass half-full slips a harmonic: sere, sweet vibration a cricket would make if it could sustain its dumb broken one-note. Porch: evening low-slung from telephone wires. Wine on my finger, put to lips: a way of thinking…
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