In memoriam: Irving Howe Hearing the news, we headed for this garden, a children’s picture book, a black-and-white movie turned to color for the Oz scenes. We’d planned to take him here. In this arbor, crabapple trees enclose us like a vault, their branches splayed like nerve ends over us. It is before…
Where did I get the idea for this picture? It was the year of El Niño-the current, I mean, and not anything else that I knew about at the time-and the meteorologists were telling us to expect strange events in the atmosphere. They didn’t say anything about events at home, where it hadn’t been good…
Neighbors, please don’t mind me this morning at windows balling my fists at the sun. Lowdown bastards, imbeciles & infidels, a tribunal of jackasses behind mirrored sunglasses with satchels of loot—wait, calm down, count to twenty & take a few deep breaths. You don’t…
When I was white I came and went, a cycle of blood and moon and tide, hid nothing of gun-shape inside me, debated evil with no one. I said: Bring me something handsome to eat and they did, that steak butter, you could spread it on bread. I said: Bring me taxis. They…
The man at her door was bald and wore a blue windbreaker. She had asked him twice what he wanted, but he had only said, “Are you Emily Fletcher?” as if he knew she was, but needed confirmation. It struck her from the man’s salutary tone that she might have won something-an envelope was about…
“Dear Muzz,” I wrote, the summer I was ten from a seedy nature camp in the Poconos with cows and calves, huge geese, some half-wild ponies —heaven for the urban savage I was then— “I have to do this letter to get breakfast. Kiss Kerry for me. I milked a cow named Clover.” (Kerry, my…
See my colors fall apart? Green to yellow with just one shade gone, the changing tints of your sun-struck eyes, if there were sun. Today the prism held to mine’s a prison, locking in the light. In one of those mirrors the colors are true. In one of these pictures the pigment’s my own….
Kirby Dexter is forty-six years old, and for as long as he has practiced law, more than twenty years, he has thought of himself as someone who solves problems. He is a CPA as well as a tax attorney, and he is the person to call if you want something airtight. He is accustomed to…
Where is the Life we lost in living? -T. S. Eliot When America died, I was passed out and I never noticed. Was it a meteor or an invisible wand that waved past our eyes and blinded everyone? I awoke one morning and electrical maggots were spurting from the mind-control machine in our disheveled living…
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