1. STORY Shhhh! her mother said. Sit down. Next to me. Time to read. The girl climbed up on the couch, crossed her ankles. Pay attention. A yellow picture book. Notice that the word “monkey” sounds like “Monica.” The title character. George, lived in Africa, a continent that on…
A violent stirring of the interior unfolding by churns. What we begin with is disequilibrium. The slurred echoing of the eye. Call it misrecognition: thinking it’s the earth that’s blurry when it’s the mind. – Lost are the coordinates of the spirit, or the animal intuition that binds— What I…
Forfeit the August you fell into an open manhole. Those years when people stole the metal lids in the middle of the night for scrap metal and grain money. Proceed forward one step. Give up the two hours in 2003 you spent tracing the chiseled characters on your mother’s gravestone. Draining your water bottle to…
Aging, he grew sure the country was gone to hell, not because of me but people too much like me for me to tell the difference. And yet he’d shown me how to mound dark soil, firm and careful, around a cucumber seedling to help it grow. Had let me drive the tractor or pretend,…
—For Feiga Maler, 1919-1942, who died in the Kraków Ghetto Night after night, what she saw in her sleep: an upside down Havdalah candle like the one she lit to usher in a new week at the end of every Sabbath, praying, “Blessed God, who separates light from dark…” The candle…
There’s no heroism to it. Like getting dressed in the morning, it’s just practice: force my head past the collar, squiggle to pull up the zipper behind my back, slither into tights and distinguish blue pumps from black. I pour the cereal in my bowl the same way each morning because that’s how it’s done—…
ashes ~ strong sunlight interacting with green, the leaf an engine trembling in the wind ~ fur and flies ~ the stars behind the clouds ~ gas as a mass ~ the sweat on my back, carrying down my spine the traces of sweat four centuries old that ran into wounds ~ recycled survival ~ the blue-black of the pacific floor and the tentacles pulling life across it ~ the pulsing…
At Christmastime we stay only one night, and it’s a dump—burn holes in brown carpet, no air. We keep the window open to the swamp, listen to raccoons and musk rats pitch in the marsh as they give last fight to the gators devouring. The next three days we drive in separate cars three hours…
I. Is the Constitution the thread that holds the country free together, or not? For years, both said no; now one picks up the thread and—apostate—changes his mind. Is it a proslavery, an antislavery document, or is it a thread that cannot hold two men together, nor set them free? II. Whose…
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