SIDE A— the face handled careful, black wax grooves going round in an endless endless grin— King Louis Armstrong blowing like no tomorrow. Oooh hoo I wanna be like you-who— Pops wipes his brow with a kerchief as if cleaning a needle, a skipping dusty LP. An ape like me would love to be human…
The child on the sled shields her eyes against the moving glare of snow looking ahead to where she’s been, growing up impatient for the precipitous slide of thought into thought. White fires divide: trees again. So the landscape is never more than an exit (the sled veering) into beauty, not a path to person,…
I walked the curving, mercury stairway Spiraling far beyond the moon In its languid way never meant For men. There I saw how we’d be left Only Mary’s stained & ancient veils, unfolding Before us as slowly as sails On our way to the rendezvous beneath the tower Where black…
There’s one good book in everyone, or so the saying goes, at least one, and I like to think of Miss Shaughnessy, my third-grade teacher, hair bunched back in a crimped bun, dress as drab as those gray afternoons spent dreaming in her class, eyes two magnified minnows behind glass thick as astronomical lenses—could she…
Here’s the little dressmaker on her knees at your feet, mouth full of pins: fixing you in the dummy’s image. Your belled satin shivers like a goblet of fizzled brut— You wanted it late in life, happiness, wanted a little family but after the kids grew up. Like a saint on her death pallet, you…
High up, in the towers of the public housing project, Laura Providencia and her mother, her brother, Angel, and her little sister, Rosita, lived under siege. In the elevator that smelled like a urinal, the junkies bobbed devotionally. The walls of the long hallways teemed with the exploding alphabet, the declamations, white, screaming, “Paco of…
It was a simple choice, the way she figured, and I still think she was right. Either she went willingly, ignoring everything still unsettled, or she could refuse and risk guilt for the rest of her life. So there really was no choice. She made a reservation, bought a suitcase, and headed for the airport….
I won’t tell you my name. I don’t know who you are; maybe you’d pass my name on, and there are many whom I fear now. I would love it if I had nothing to tell you. I have lost nearly everything-country, family, name-but I have retained my honor and gained a story, to my…
He lived with a pack of stray dogs up in the hills beyond Tibidabo. I went first to see the house shaped like a flower, a late unfinished work of the great Gaudí, and found the wild man, bearded, dressed for winter on a hot June afternoon in the dense pine forests: jackets over jackets,…
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