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I had only one prayer, but it spread like lilies, a single flower duplicating itself over and over until it was rampant, uncountable. At ten I lay dreaming in its crushed green blades. How did I come by it, strange notion that the hard stems of rage could be broken, that the lilies were made…
She’s just dying to see you, so excited, and you really can’t refuse a ninety-two-year-old,” said Miles Henry to his old friend Grace Lafferty, the famous actress, who was just passing through town, a very quick visit. Miles and Grace were getting on, too, but they were nowhere near the awesome age of ninety-two, the…
I was born on the grounds of the Mount Mohonk Hospital for the Insane, where my father was Chief of Psychiatry, and because of this I grew accustomed to the sounds of misery before I went to sleep at night. I would lie in bed upstairs in my family’s house, which was situated one hundred…
We were given these instruments after your birth: syringe, Tegaderm, Heparin flush. This morning, I found them behind the file cabinet. Dare I throw them out? I am a superstitious girl. When I stood in the parted door and gave you up for the scan, anesthetized, dye-injected, your one-year-old body sang its sweet, green galaxy…
Even as a child I could induce it at will. I’d go to where the big rocks stayed cold in the woods all summer, and tea mind would come to me like water over stones, pool to pool, and in that way I taught myself to think. Green teas are my favorites, especially the basket-fired…
One of the few friends I have left asks the question. As a poet, you would expect him not only to ask but to answer. “How do we know the agenda of love?” he asks and elaborates, “If you expose the heart, it can split wide open.” “So why do we love?” I ask him….
Earlier in her literary career, Mary Gordon was fond of quoting Flannery O’Connor, who’d once said that writers learned everything they needed to know before the age of eight. What does Gordon — the celebrated, bestselling author of four novels, three collections, and a memoir — believe she had learned? “I think I learned the…
At the end of the dark at the end of the hall, my older sister stood by the mirror, casting for her real face in a square of light. I was eight. Had she known that I was still awake, pillow doubled under to raise my head, she’d have screamed and slammed the bathroom door,…
The front door’s latch slides into its brass socket, the kind of sound that pushes you off, like a flip turn at the pool, your thighs recoil and you’re out past the flags, well on your way . . . only I’m talking about the last lap, when there’s no next turn, the future is…
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