In August, the summer after her ninth-grade year, the girl-pudgy, moonfaced, with dull brown hair and new breasts-met the man who became her first husband. Before that, she’d been seeing a tall boy she danced with at junior high graduation, starting with a concentric-circle wheel-dance the chaperons employed to pull the boys and girls from…
On Good Friday, the day she suggested the Easter parade, Linda Hartley was following advice she had given a reader from Petaluma, Texas, in one of her recent columns. “We should all wear bonnets,” she said to the three men sitting next to her at the bar, “and walk up and down this block.” She…
While I was at the Albuquerque airport bar-pueblo turquoise and sandstone-waiting to meet my girlfriend, a woman offered to buy me a drink. She was better than good-looking. We each ordered a frozen margarita, did a salud, and I walked her politely to her gate, and she kissed my lips as she went to the…
In the past, readers and critics expected serious novelists to catch the spirit of the new in their fiction, to absorb the particular experiences of living and thinking in a specific time and place. The form and language of fiction evolved to fit changing times and tastes-sometimes briskly, sometimes slowly-to reflect or critique transformations in…
Words, together we’ll have the wedding feast, I’ll spread the canopy, bring the glass for you to crush. You’ll arrive early, time and light in your pocket, dark boxes in the car, each with the name of an object. Alone this way, no guests expected—jars, bottles, vials with things like knife, cloud, and blood. Leave…
for Eleanor Wilner Sometimes there is even too much of what we don’t want. This dancing planet, its many communiqués hurtling across us. My lover types endearments into space, swears he can only see my back. Something in it that is diluted and dark, something in the distance that is lunar,…
Gish Jen lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband, eight-year-old son, and one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and the hectic pace of her life is reflected in her rapid-fire speech. The celebrated author of two novels and a collection, Jen is known for her humor and brimming intelligence, her ready opinions and easy laugh, her charm, and, not…
Slice of yellow wind in yellow curtains I sewed although the house was never mine except where the rod went through. Breeze does it. Or snow on pines. Faint click of yellowing spoons. Or crow-call piercing snow-pine reflected in the spoon-shaped past, its wing its crescent moon. Seeking any equally black thing. There,…
Glad to see people thought of it, brought Warren’s darts, a bag of chewing tobacco, his baseball cap, a book of poems, some photos. Glad that the mortician tried his best to dress him in coat, shirt, and tie—the wound was through the back and out the chest, I keep thinking—and firm the lip, close…
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