Much has been written about the influence of the academy on the writer who teaches there. But what about the influence a writer may have on the academy? On our way to the airport after her visit at my campus, Lucille Clifton, speaking of poets who teach, asks: “Who else can teach students about the…
Not here, where the birds pound their beaks on the rail and the blue jay feeds before the sparrow and a dried pot of mums holds a frozen pink flower, no, not here but elsewhere. Not here, where the grass no longer wonders or cares if the wind beheads a sunflower under the terror of…
We swept up everything in sight: gobbled up Soutines, Bonnards Modiglianis. Lenny snagged Monet’s boat studio. Jim seized that mauve felicity of creamy lovers: Le Bonheur de Vivre. I took that terrifying Van Gogh nude, horrific & farouche, all poverty & pubic hair & suffering. Together after all those years—three hebephrenic & disheveled antiquarian collectors…
We were crazy in love. Crazy. He wasn’t handsome. He was maybe even ugly. Abraham Lincoln ugly. With face bumps like Abe had. But he had angel radiance. He outdid the sun. His very glance polished you. He rubbed light into your skin as if light were lotion. I loved him. Nothing with this much…
I sighed this morning, a slow deep inspiration that dragged the air into the recesses of my lungs, portions I imagine had been forgotten in the last few months. And then for a second or two I felt the life pass out of me. As if it were a prelude, a taste for the sake…
Ah, so there you are, somewhere between the Demerol and the morphine, silently emptying my catheter jug. Don’t do that, I want to say, but my voice is lost from two weeks on the ventilator. Baby Girl, I want to say hello, say I know your name, say how much I’ve always loved you, but…
“Come look at the nudes, Carla.” My uncle started heading towards his studio with his Chihuahua slung over his shoulder, the dog’s ass snug in his fat hand. I skipped behind him, happy, cracking spearmint gum. Uncle Samson breathed with a chronic stuffy nose and dragged the heels of his feet as he walked because…
I came across this word unexpectedly. It means fatty, greasy, unctuous—I can’t say exactly since I’ve not seen it before. That’s the beauty of language—such surprise and variation, each synonym a slightly different meaning. I think of unctuous as a wormy, mealy-mouthed flatterer; greasy, a male: disingenuous, pomaded, cigarette dangling from mouth. It’s in these…
There’s a stealthy, sort of leopard- like knocking at my door tonight I half wish were you, but the sky’s grainy violet and no one’s out there loitering darkly like a dent. Know what’s going down? Total eclipse of the moon, Kid—it’s pretty dim out, just the gas station’s block of light like the landmark…
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