i. Other People I begin with what I see plainly, before and around me. There is much to curtail. To one side, my neighbors are a family, extremely nuclear in a contemporary way. There’s a mother, a father, a girl, and a boy, both children from previous marriages, the girl blond, the boy brunette, both…
In Chekhov, everyone’s unhappy— this one loves that one who loves someone else. The doctor, a fixture of the plays, is always old as Chekhov, who died young, must have felt himself to be. And the aging writer, who also resembles Chekhov, chases a girl he will abandon soon and is stuck with the habit…
When our reprieve began I was reintroduced to Osip, my husband— a gaunt man who walked clutching his trousers. (Belts could be used for suicide, a serious offense.) The prison staff was rosy-faced. The young learn quickly: To kill is good, to be killed, bad. Soon they rise in the ranks, have their photos taken…
Stephen Dobyns is the author of nine books of poetry, including Concurring Beasts, Griffon, The Balthus Poems, Cemetery Nights, Body Traffic, Velocities, and Common Carnage. He is also the author of a collection of essays on poetry, Best Words, Best Order, and nineteen novels, ten of which comprise a very popular series of detective books,…
Clock a few miles east on Jericho Turnpike— how new asphalt levels the ride. Consider too the foot-thick concrete slabs (poured in the ’30’s or earlier) we used to drive on, the road beneath the road. Before that, plank: two parallel rows of hemlock, four inches square—sleepers, laid in three to four feet apart, upon…
for Osip Mandelstam For us, all that’s left is a dried bee, tilted onto one wing. Not long ago, a bloom fastened its tongue, while its belly tried unsuccessfully to tip it backwards. We mustn’t touch— anything without water is without give. This bee is our scout— one day, dust will pronounce itself in…
Heart feels sad. He’s tired of being a heart and wants to be a lung. A lung never lacks a sister or brother. He wants to be a finger. A finger always has a family. Or a spleen which only feels anger and is never sad. Sometimes Heart feels joyous, beats with vigor. But then…
I’ve covered hundreds of miles in search of the perfect song—records often so ruined they sound buried as if they were being played under the floor. Along with 78’s, Stanley’s Old Furniture Store sold miniatures: homunculi, chairs for mice, golf carts and threshers, a pair of Guernseys housed in a matchbox. I studied these as…
From a rain-stained square tunneled into the rough-shingled roof, the skylight begins, in small creaks, to complain. I crane, look straight up at the bottoms of two black feet— three prongs and inches, each; between them dips the hammock of a full-bellied crow, round and big as the cauldron he belongs in. From below, I…
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