When I smashed the plastic Barney plate to smithereens, bashing it over and over against the slate rim of the sink as yellow shards flew all over the kitchen floor, the children were upstairs, and I was thankful they hadn’t seen me like that, or been scared. I could sweep up everything, through a smear…
Why delay? Today I stopped to rub the fur, like the tender ear of a cat, stopped to stroke the lush gray plush (and oh, the pink!) as if the cat had rasped itself to frenzy, to an ecstasy of itch all raw this steak tartar, this chafe of meat, and because of this I…
Kai opened her eyes and looked around her. She was disoriented until she saw the Canadian customs booth in front, with the maple leaf decal on one of the glass panes. She realized she had fallen asleep, missing both the customs booth on the U.S. side and the Ambassador Bridge. Now she and Bailey were…
The millennial moment. We can’t know what it will mean, though we’ll live through it and be lived by it. But with the new millennium in mind, we’ve chosen for our cover Strong Winds, a painting by the Minnesota artist Kate Borowske, seeing it as an emblem of the moment — the poet, or fiction…
The year my father’s molar disintegrated was also the year my half brother died. The two were related. “Willpower!” my father said. “I will keep my tooth from decaying.” But decay it did. Every day he’d show us his molar as proof of the immense powers of his will. We saw the hole grow bigger,…
A summer visitor to the Cape Cod resort village of Provincetown, Massachusetts, is liable to see just about anything walking down Commercial Street, the town’s main drag and zone of street theater. From muscle boys with shaved chests and nail polish to Portuguese fishermen in waders to a drag queen wearing a G-string, metal helmet,…
By the third occasion-she couldn’t exactly call them “dates”-Mira thought she had him figured out. Before that she had not been able to determine whether he was a crazy person acting sane or a sane person acting crazy. She had met him through the personals. His ad had described him as “energetic” and “ambitious,” and…
I rejoice in the poems not written: the cruelly discarded: the crippled, the asthmatic, the anemic: the poem about a photograph: about what love is like: about how strangely I felt that day: about something about me, noticed. Bless you, go on the ash-heap, that fine compost from muscle, blood, bone, which fuels surely the…
Rita Dove, On the Bus with Rosa Parks, poems: In her seventh collection, Dove mines American mythologies and histories to brilliant effect, arriving at relevant and artful poems that stir and sing. (Norton)
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