Cracked Sunday. Babble of backyard voices, witnessing over barbecue & open flame. Gulls cry above the peeling, fish-slicked decks of trawlers as if they have something to say besides hunger. I tell you these things, O Theophilus— so you will know the apostles when they come swollen-throated on the esplanade’s karaoke stand singing Volare, volare…
V-necked, tobacco-colored cardigan pocked with tiny holes burned by embers of his cigarettes. He wore it when he’d flung off his collar in the sacristy. I believe he preferred the beauty of women to the virtue of sermons. I believe he preferred their beauty to giving absolution. A gift from his mother who favored him…
John & Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who also had never met. —from a freshman’s short story They were like gazelles who occupied different grassy plains, running in opposite directions from different lions. They were like postal clerks in different zip codes, with different vacation time, their bosses adamant and…
Gina had all the symptoms: sleep disturbances, hot flashes, irritability, weight gain, loss of libido, aching joints, and heart palpitations. The one she complained of most was hot flashes, which she dealt with by throwing off her clothes and cursing. As far as Evan was concerned, her irritability was the worst symptom; she was increasingly…
John Clare wrote poems on scraps of paper, erased them with bread he ate afterwards. When he ran out of scraps he wrote in his hat. When he ran out of bread he ate grass.
The silhouette of a mountain. Above it a dark halo of rain. Dusk’s light fading, holding on. He thinks he’s seen some visible trace of some absent thing. Knows he won’t talk about it, can’t. He arrives home to the small winter pleasures of a clothing tree, a hatrack, his heroine in a housedress saying…
1 We got up at dawn, ignored the yolky sun, loaded our navy-blue Austin with suitcases, and then drove straight to the coast, stopping only on the verge of Sarajevo, so I could pee. I sang communist songs the entire journey: songs about mournful mothers looking through graves for their dead sons; songs about the…
She would stand in that place where pilgrims and petitioners who craved God waited for her answers. Intermediary, she would pace as if chained to it: the division in mind. She was no go-between, finally. Look at it, she was Sophia or Ruah, she was hokhmah. Her shopping cart full of bird masks, low-watt light-…
When Bodhidharma came from the West, for nine years he sat, face-to-wall. A student asked old Yang-chi, “What could this possibly mean?” “He was Indian,” Yang-chi replied with a grin, “he spoke no Chinese.” Chuang Tzu says, “If you follow dictates of an accomplished heart, then you have found a teacher. And who can fail…
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