Article

  • The Night Nurse

    Don’t doubt there’s a future. Rushing toward you. It was flat pavement, a busy pedestrian mall between downtown streets where she was walking in the tattered sunshine of a moist April morning when without warning the sidewalk tilted to her left, and a sharp pain like a wasp’s stinging attacked the calf of her left…

  • Somewhere It Still Moves

    I was having dinner with my friends Howie and Francine. The restaurant was old, maybe five hundred years: whitewashed walls, great black beams on the ceiling, no windows. We felt we were in the midst of history. As Americans, the past seemed absent from our country. The waiter kept knocking his head with his fist,…

  • The Afterlife

    Then came the day even as the water glass felt heavy and I knew, as I’d suspected, I grew lighter. I grew lighter, yes. Say, have you ever fainted? Such a distinct horizon as you are raised above your pain, like Chekhov’s, and it was clear to them the end was still far off ….

  • Santiago: Forestal Park

    Teenagers and oldsters, married couples and lovers— it is eight in the evening and everyone is kissing. On park benches, on the grassy slopes of the hill, sitting on curbs, joined in cafés they are kissing. (I am not kissing; I am strolling along. If I want activity, I have my newspaper.) Why is the…

  • The Story

    Innocent and earnest, good at marathons, the surgeon believed in his hands; he said he’d cut the tumor out, a convoluted unnatural thing wrapping its tentacles around the brain’s little house. Nothing more than architecture, then he paused: he knew about the maze, the puzzle. He put on his white clothes; over his entire being…

  • Unholy Sonnet

    Amazing to believe that nothingness Surrounds us with delight and lets us be And that the meekness of nonentity, Despite the friction of the world of sense, Despite the leveling of violence, Is all that matters. All the energy We force into the match head and the city Explodes inside a loving emptiness. Not Dante’s…

  • The Community

    Had it worked well even once? Can one point to a golden age of good times? Whatever the case, the arms decided at last to separate themselves. They were not like the others; they had their own tastes and ambitions: pleasures the others could never appreciate. The legs went next, alleging a life of agony…