When Russell Banks and I agreed that our theme was to be Borderlands, we chose it partly for its open-endedness. Literally and figuratively, borderlands strike us as places where powerful forces come into contact with one another, where sparks fly. Specifically, it’s the politics of that point of collision that we’re interested in. Whatever else…
The Low Road Soon she headed into the wind. Sepulveda Boulevard would lead her to the cornfields and crows of Scripture, a field gullied by rainfall, and parking lots where men sat in cars smoking. Sometimes they got out of their cars and went to the bathroom in a cement barrack. This action scared her…
Some years ago in your infinite European boredom you finally concluded that maybe Indians are really a noble race, yes, somewhat tragic but definitely tied to the earth. So, you decided to become one. Why not? Who would care? And who would know the difference? Your cheekbones were a little high and you were a…
Here’s a romantic prison for you. This could be Scotland: a crag and far below the froth-marled river. Where is the stag, the laird, where are the baying hounds? Welcome instead to Hotel California. Johnny Cash sang right there, in Graystone Chapel, and from the blue, disconsolate congregation he drew, like blood, whoops and yelps…
People who’ve seen relatives die by fire, stand to the right of this line. People who’ve imagined large, drug-taking siblings, crouch down by their feet and warm your hands. People who offer syllogistic explanations for plain brown acts, play musical minds to the tune of any anthem. People who delay sobbing to answer the telephone,…
Just over the horizon a great machine of death is roaring and rearing. One can hear it always. Earthquake, starvation, the ever- renewing field of corpse-flesh. In this valley the snow falls silently all day and out our window We see the curtain of it shifting and folding, hiding us away in …
Most of my life I courted simplicity and tried to leash any wind-breaking plagues of rhetoric that swirled in my brain. I prayed for rational segues from word to deed, pain to relief, and madness to sanity with little success so sometimes words surged like mad lemmings to my tongue and I spoke from a…
Heat sensors, cameras on automatic pan, vast slabs of prefabricated wall trucked in and joined on site like grandiose dominos. . . . It took the state eight years to plan to keep those men apart from you and me and only sometimes from each other, for even gang rapists and murderers are social animals….
The lengthy lawns of the rich run down to the lake’s lap. Cats steal chiroles from the nets where they’re drying on the shore. Dresses and jeans lie flat below the fish, dancing an ancient, static line. Their owners’ hair floats in black, soapy masses on the green sway. I’m stuck in jangling shade, no…
No products in the cart.