Article

  • Last Things

    My sister and I step briskly out of the greengrocer to get away from the men behind us in line who have told us, in great detail, what they’d like to do to us, where they intend to put certain parts of their bodies. The clerk, kindly, rings their purchases up slowly, so Cyndy and…

  • Out of Control

                 y wife and I are waiting for children.         Every morning for three months, Joan’s alarm goes off at seven-even if she hasn’t climbed into bed until four or five-and she gropes the night table in the dark for her basal thermometer, slips it under her tongue, hits the snooze bar on her clock…

  • Help

    You took the room in the attic. Watched television by yourself. I used to walk down the dim stairs to the basement to be with you at night, to listen to stories of plantations and dictatorships as you folded with precise care the underpants of my family. You who knew our human stains: faint arrowheads…

  • My Good War

    The other day I was wondering how to make onion soup, and my mind served up the bowl I had in Seattle just before we shipped out to Yokohama-my first onion soup, with a slice of toasted french bread and some melted Gruyere cheese. This was the end of 1946. I was six and a…

  • Food: A Memoir

    Greens Start simply. Lettuce green (light). Collard green (dark). Endive (deep thick white). Lettuce green (red at the curling edges). Lettuce green (with a spine of white). Mustard green (lace-spice). Cabbages, kales, and Brussels sprouts (yellow past their prime). And escarole (and oh . . .). Endive (the thick white). Greens are my delight. Swiss…

  • Labor Day

    In a coffee can his flower beside loose bricks ledged on a city rowhouse gerrymandered for six kids, roosts of rooms, tilting floors, swayback roof sloping toward a Baltimore shipyard still as a world war watch Iggy Jones, old boilermaker, the belly on him, down to two cigars a day, living off the mailman’s pouch…

  • Bad

    In the practice of my trade, as writer and teacher, I lie by omission, I sometimes think, as much as I tell the truth. I note, for an eager, untalented first-year student, that her story is interesting, that it shows terrific energy, that there’s some marvelous insight here into waking up hungover on Saturday morning…

  • Cousins

    High. Mindless. Cackle at the edge of the world. And the geese are flying there and crying, for two weeks now they’ve come racketing each morning, miles and miles of them, pouring. Where do they come from, where did they sleep last night? I can’t see them, but the question ticks like a clock about…