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1. Where water meets water, where rain hangs lead-heavy for days before finally deciding to harden and fall, where the nearest road is sixty miles away and that a narrow track of gravel, where the lake is as still as a photograph and has never been photographed, where the trout return in accordance with a…

Quentin Carter’s, little Junie June-Bug’s running joke          was “Where’s my quarter,                   you better give me my quarter.” Junie, 12, runt of the 6th grade, School 109, Queen’s Village—          in your face, pest & joker,                   “Where’s my quarter, you better give me my quarter.” . . . This morning,          police arrested…

When my grandmother left the house                 to live with my aunts, my grandfather, who spent so much time in the sugar                           cane fields, returned daily to the emptiness of the clapboard house he built                 with his own hands, and he sat in the dark to eat beans he cooked right in the…

A vial of it: dusty, warm From being held so long In my hand; the little cork that fit So well, the cap I would undo In secret, sprawling on the floor Of the basement, recalling a scene From Kafka, or glancing in horror At the old vermilion volume On Chinese torture, or savoring The…

for Angie Suss-Paul Around the corner where I lived a beautiful synagogue was burning. Around the corner where I lived. Around the corner. A beautiful synagogue. Was burning. Where I lived. Around the corner where I lived a beautiful synagogue was burning. My father came home in the evening I didn’t recognize him. He didn’t…

after a painting by Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) Come with me, toward the leafless trees. See the way they lean, dazed with fog and grief as they seek out one another in the haze? Isn’t that how we are able to go on—by believing all that matters will one day be revealed? That is why…

for Cathal Ó Searcaigh, granted one wish by the fairy youth, wants nothing, so help me, but one dropdead kiss from the youth, but how can he forget Jack Nolan who wished away Death for all mankind, Falcarragh’s     own Jack Nolan whose uncharacteristically generous wish trapped Death in his fisherman’s duffle, a large-hearted wish…

Imagine that all you can do is glitter and you are only one small star in an expanse as wide as infinity is, and surrounded by a darkness filled up with other glitterings, fire and rock making flame into a voice. And these other small voices are all you hear in the void, their cries…

The dogs have stopped barking. Even the grass has grown quieter, holding back from the wind. As you and I walk down the sidewalk, our voices are like a memory, whose deep purpose has gone inside, into the walls and floors and ceilings, where it no longer reaches the air but lies in wait for…