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I was happy once for nine days. My housekeeper found a novena for hopeless cases on her seat in church, a prayer to be recited every day for nine days, and she thought she might as well say it for me since I had been complaining of hard times. She apologized for calling me a…
Margaret Many Wounds was dying. Three years earlier she had been diagnosed as diabetic, and now, although she felt her health rapidly declining, she refused to go to the hospital. "I am old anyway," she told her relatives. "Leave me be." Early one morning she called to her daughter: "Let me have a mirror." Lydia…
I want to erase your footprints from my walls. Each pillow is thick with your reasons. Omens fill the sidewalk below my window: a woman in a party hat, clinging to a tin-foil balloon. Shadows creep slowly across the tar, someone yells, “Stop!” and I close my eyes. I can't watch as this town slowly…
Old hands take her infant eyes. Her hair comes to the razor, lips and teeth retreat, her fingers snap, her legs and arms and tongue unsocket. So the bed is dry of flesh. The bones are whispered to. The sister by the window etches hairlines, pulls the blue thread through the handbones, footbones, boils a…
When I was a boy, my grandmother clutched my chin and said, "Promise me one thing. That you'll never let that mother of yours buy a Mercedes." I promised. It was easy. There was no chance of our buying anything. We filled out sweepstakes for an hour every night that we sent away with stamps…
From the manger strewn with fake straw, from pinched nerves of adolescence— that gangling second birth of the body— it grew as I grew, a girl watching the stained-glass fish from the choir stall, ichthys in the Methodist church, a small triangular hole in its belly revealing the gravel parking lot, a red metallic swatch…
When you pretended to shoot me on your porch with a gun I couldn't see I saw something in you that embarrassed me and the yellow light in your house seemed to illuminate only your room as if there wasn't enough of it to spread into the heart under the stairs to distinguish something other…
Next year, writing his personal experience essay to convince admissions at Penn he's Ivy League material despite uneven grades, he'll describe in amusing detail the one baseball game his father took him to, and get in on a scholarship despite his father's explicit pessimism. And he'll do well, though he's not as brilliant as his…
To give thanks, after all, for disasters survived, the Mexican artists painted on tin or wood precise scenes of disaster—the crushed bus spilling passengers like pickup sticks, the stillborn child being lifted from the bed, the dancer propped in a plastic corset. Somewhere in the picture—a radiant wheel or a saint's face—was an inkling of…
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