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…
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…
The first birds chirp again, as if they heard the whole late July planet tilting with new law. Goose honk and crow caw and squirrel jabber are dawn light crawling up the huge maple trunk, tinting rough gray wood till it glows, green and mossy and tropical in the tilted passing of planetary items. This…
after Natalia Ginzburg “The following essay, ‘He and I,’ captures the seesaw of human companionship and love with a patience and sensitivity to interconnectedness that it is hard to imagine a male essayist attempting, much less equaling.” -Phillip Lopate She is quintessentially French. I am, in the loosest sense of the word, American. She always…
My brother and I without coats on the front porch waved goodbye, the day our father left, with hands held low, close to our chests, so our mother behind us at the window couldn’t see. She stayed inside, and when his car took the corner, we turned and saw her—the curtains, long and white, parted…
When we undressed in the tack room, we kept our backs turned, cradled our new breasts like the barn cat’s kittens and counted ribbons strung like tiny laundry overhead: blue, red, yellow, white, pink, green. We giggled in the dark there over the school nurse’s diagram, the new words. But we all said yes, as…
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