The young woman in 15f stood looking out her window. Thousands of other windows-wavy rectangles, shaken towels of light-seemed to signal in code, You are not alone. Of course, she was not alone, anyway. Margaret turned back to the living room, where her Nebraska mother was sitting up very straight. “Twenty-eight is not old,” Margaret…
My mother is dressed for the occasion in a purple, lime green, and chartreuse Pucci peignoir and matching toreador pants, a latter-day transgender Joseph in her robe of many colors. I am wearing harlequin sunglasses and my father’s undershirt. My sister, as yet unborn in this recurring pageant, stands by in the persona of a…
Johnny Appleseed When Andrew Carroll was a junior at Columbia University, a friend gave him a copy of a speech by Joseph Brodsky. Carroll was studying English literature at the time, but he had chosen the major for purely utilitarian reasons — his ambition was to become a movie and television producer, and he had…
I was living in San Francisco’s Mission District, at Valencia and 14th, across the street from some projects and a Gold’s Gym and above the Lady Luck Candle Shop. On the corner was a dusty convenience store run by two Lebanese brothers. You could get loose cigarettes there for a nickel. Up 14th Street, half…
At seven a.m., nobody’s here but me and the pigeons and a few sparrows caucusing in his hair. Everyone knows how patient he was. I talk to him sometimes, but he never answers. “Good morning, Mr. Lincoln. I’m going to clean you up real good today.” His hands rest on the chair, yet I’ve seen…
My father was a dreamer and a rainbow chaser and sometimes he took me along for the ride. My favorite times were driving in the car with him going nowhere, being nomads, him listening to some inner music, his upper lip caught in his lower teeth. It felt very restful after my mother’s shrieking. I…
MASTHEAD Guest Editors Stuart Dybek & Jane Hirshfield Editor Don Lee Poetry Editor David Daniel Associate Editor Susan Conley Assistant Fiction Editor Maryanne O'Hara Founding Editor DeWitt Henry Founding Publisher Peter O'Malley Editorial Assistants: Gregg Rosenblum, Melissa Cook, and Tom Herd. Poetry Readers: Renee Rooks, Brian Scales, Michael Henry, Paul Berg, Charlotte Pence, Jessica Purdy,…
from The Feast of Love As a Jew, I am drawn in a suicidal manner toward the maddest of Christians. Kierkegaard, being one of the craziest and most lovable of the lot, and, therefore, dialectically, possibly the most sane of them all, is of compelling interest to me. All my life, I have tracked his…
I’m remembering the time you sat on a roof in Wisconsin to get away for a smoke, and a drunk senior stumbled to the edge of the roof to take a piss then folded his body down next to yours. Below, a faint sound of drums and bass throbbed through the house. “Pigs,” said the…
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