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  • Safe

    He hollowed out the book, a window in each page, until he made a safe to hold the things that when he touched them made him tremble: a stolen turquoise ring, a condom sealed in foil, a quarter lid of pot. His house was safe and warm, the rooms were bright occasions and yet his…

  • Lawrence

    On two occasions in the past twelve months I have failed, when someone at a party spoke of him with a dismissive scorn, to stand up for D. H. Lawrence, a man who burned like an acetylene torch from one end to the other of his life. These individuals, whose relationship to literature is approximately…

  • Satchmo

    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…

  • Sled

    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,…

  • Epith

    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…

  • Laura Providencia in the New World

    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…

  • The Big Fish

    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….