Just before she flew off like a swan to her wealthy parents’ summer home, Bruce’s college girlfriend asked him to improve his expertise at oral sex, and offered him some technical advice: use nothing but his tongue tip to flick the light switch in his room on and off a hundred times a day until…
The autumn aster, those lavender ones, and the dark-blooming sedum are beginning to bloom in the rainy earth with the remote intensity of a dream. These things take over. I am a glorifier, not very high up on the vocational chart, and I glorify everything I see, everything I can think of. I want ordinary…
Hazy Friday afternoon, traffic slugs. I get off a strange exit miles before mine hoping for the shortcut home. Between tenements, the sun’s intuition peeks through a pink bowling shirt on a clothesline. I project the night. After a shower, my evening peck—the click of plastic glasses— kids’ muted voices of cocktail hour— I never…
Not sure what to leave in, I begin with Jenny, her sister and me at the anchor of our great mall, Sears: We stuff cassettes down her crooked spine’s brace, and stroll through our mother’s aisle (lifting douches), into the store ladies’ room where we fill the drooping bags at taps that keep running. Past…
A punt, a water keg and some bottles washed up on the beach at Viareggio. Eight days passed before they found the body. The face and hands were fleshless, and everybody knows Keats’s poems were in his breast pocket, though what pierces me the most is how the book was doubled back as if the…
My mother waited till now to hand down this gold razor her father let slip in the washbowl. In a hurry to teamster the horses, soap in his earlobe and nostril, he climbed into the fire wagon. When she poured the wash water onto pebbles, hard gold sluiced at the bottom with the whiskers. A…
This was what responsibility meant in a dinosaur industry, toward the end of yet another quarter of bad-to-worse news: You called the travel agent back, and even though there was indeed an economy room in the hotel where the conference was being held, a room overlooking the cooling towers, you asked if there wasn’t something…
On July 14, 1954, Frida Kahlo, who had swallowed the world whole, sat up in the crematorium cart and spit it out, her hair blazing like an aureole, her face smiling in the center of a sunflower before she disintegrated along with her seeds. The phenomenon of heat causing a body to rise has been…
He had done what he promised himself he would do— Kept his mouth shut in the bar—but now driving The miles to her house he felt the talk rising Inside him like ardor, the heat of self-love. But he swore to himself that tonight he would talk Mostly with his shoulders and eyes, let his…
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