Translated by Gustavo Pérez Firmat She gave me a brief, hard hug, one of those you feel down to your toenails, a mortal leap into life, an incandescent caress, the kind that doesn’t last but scalds, sudden and fleeting: a spell rather than a squeeze. To be embraced like this once in a while…
When I imagine the dead I think of them doing absolutely nothing. Every morning a tiny red ant has left bites up my arm. I’m not god as far as I know, though it’s possible. Mostly I feel like a child or elder, or a thing scraped together from what’s in between. One…
All I beg of this blighted year is to wake up well-slept early one August morning and to pull on yesterday’s clothes and ride the mile or two to the deli on Brackett Road when the sun is soft and low and the waves in the distance sound like a second breeze and to lean…
At first, I meant to write a treatise on happiness, but only as a kind of anti-history. —Anne Boyer, Garments Against Women Recently, I’ve had a case of Anita Brookner-itis—by which I mean a propensity to read and reread her twenty-four novels despite the aching sadness they leave in the pit of my stomach. Given…
When you’re in a helicopter with a bleeding brain and the pilot reassures you it’s a beautiful night to fly, it’s hard to know whether to feel relieved. I suppose that’s better than an iffy or a terrible night to fly. Though isn’t every night a terrible night to fly with a bleeding brain. …
What is this thing that must be won by experience? It has me walking on sidewalks next to myself, both selves watching women and men coming toward us, the fruit vendors and lovers— I wonder about the husband and wife, she collects money and bags the fruit, he loads and unloads, and they always…
What is this thing that must be won by experience? It has me walking on sidewalks next to myself, both selves watching women and men coming toward us, the fruit vendors and lovers— Why does everything occur in pairs, the glance and the glance averted, the gaze and the gaze returned? A woman drops…
—from Definitions Freudenschreck, or “intense pleasure-fright”—leave it to the Germans To coin a word for the fleeting sense of being seized By such an inexplicable joy it verges on terror. Or maybe it’s inexplicable terror pretending to be joy. Also, a physical phenomenon: neurologists say the amygdala Glows red as a jack ball whether…
1. Woke up early to write, killed flies instead. 2. In the pot, I boil bones with huājiāo and fennel, attempting to reproduce a past taste. The result is a gray diluted broth, ghost enough to conjure. 3. On Facebook you can tag a picture as “my grandmother.” If you hover your…
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