Drunk, her eyes would water and sparkle and she’d hold my jaw in her palm as though I were her child or dog, saying, Listen to me, Douglas. Don’t dare turn into one of these aging bachelor teachers. Then she’d reel off names of half a dozen doddering men in the physics and social studies…
We are not scaled. We do not boast horns, or quills, or wooly coats. Our skin is pliable and thin. No fangs or scales conceal our throats. Worms regrow their missing tails, though tail is all they know of limb. A cat can close her inner eye. Ants hide beneath their skeletons. But humans, scant…
At Tin Mill Canal the left headlight burned out. Darker now: eight eyes blinking at the nailing darkness. The sewage treatment plant and its sooty gray sewage-treated smoke rising openly into pinkblack air went grayer. Near the end now nothing to worry about-did you do that, Rootie?-you saboteur you sly bastard you it’ll take more…
Tires crunch against the crushed stone driveway, and a flash of headlights crosses Kent’s bedroom window, waking him from a light sleep. But he wasn’t asleep, he tells himself. Merely resting, eyes closed. Listening. Just as, when Rose was still in high school, he lay in bed after midnight and listened for the sound of…
Just as, a stand of trees before you— you now sit turned sideways, on a trail rock, incidentally, listening to see what comes up, down, or out, if you do manage to contain your clumsy sighs, your leafy rustles—to pass the time you idly eye up one far pine to where a birch crosses it,…
When asked about the role of martial arts in his life, Madison Smartt Bell replies that it gave him the opportunity to be bad at something. To those of us who have followed his career as a writer, it’s something of a relief to know that this might actually be true. In sixteen years he…
Of A. Of the abracadabra triangled below the navel’s amulet. Of the underworld still with me as I drive all night to you following a red Trans Am, my beacon and talisman. Before me the mysterious lands of corn and soy. Behind me our Atlantic’s salty winds. O glorious Susquehanna and wild grasses! Here in…
The third time we made love the magic was already gone. We should have stopped right there, but instead we moved into an apartment, adopted a cat you named Pharaoh, and took a long car trip to the mountains. By then the circus was in town. A handful of tough-looking dwarves in black leather drank…
Think of the word “spires” or the word “aspires,” and you see ascendance, a reaching, a rising up, a breathing upon, a breathing into life — you hear the word “spirit.” Elizabeth Spires’s work seems deeply linked with all the facets and motives of these words associated with her name. Even in her first book…
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