Every dusk there gather in the trees birds whose bodies lean heavy as magnolias on the bent and swaying branches. Every dusk, in trees, birds gather, looking heavy as magnolias or the shadows of magnolias, since in color birds are darker; and since they scatter, turning to reassemble on their branches, burning slowly in their…
“As it leaves dawn behind and advances into day, light prostitutes itself and is redeemed—ethics of twilight— at the moment it vanishes.” —E. M. Cioran Ethics of secrets and vanishings, of sunny downfalls and cloudy coverups. The reign of commonsense has ended and strangeness floats through the air. Deceptive moonlight, dusky erasures—…
There was this cock in high school, not that I had anything to do with it but we girls talked a lot, giggled, how it had a job to do and was often seen rising behind its spandex suit at the country club. It worked pretty good, we figured, but there was this one girl…
In one of his essays, Gary Soto writes that as a child, he had imagined he would “marry Mexican poor, work Mexican hours, and in the end die a Mexican death, broke and in despair.” The statement might seem surprising, coming as it does from such a well-established writer. Considered one of the best Chicano…
A man walks into the gallery on a sunny afternoon carrying a fistful of golf clubs. I’m aware that there’s been some kind of traffic thing going on outside for the last few minutes, but I haven’t gone to the window to check it out-happens all the time around here. The softening silence of the…
Sacred day of rain, the crowds on Karol’s Bridge thin out, slightly repentant of their tourist ways, hunker down in pensions and hotels, to ponder the weird twists of language to be found in their brochures, or complain of the thinness of the towels, or of the pickpockets who speak the quick language of the…
Russell Banks: Rule of the Bone (HarperCollins, May 1995) , a novel about a homeless, drug-addicted teenager living on the edge of society.
Deborah set about making herself useful from the minute she woke up, and most mornings she was first in the household to rise. She pushed off the bedcovers, slipped into her robe, and washed in the bathroom, dressing cautiously and wincing if a zipper or button clanked against the closet door; her bed was in…
Recent downpour, the black streets glisten, the red and white bus dips down like a sail into the runoff pooled near the tram tracks. Fifteen stories above, I drink beer, floating in my own sea—the smell of mushrooms frying in the kitchen—while the dark spike of the Palace of Culture fades into the blackness of…
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