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…
I keep forgetting how to enter the other world how to stay floating into the periphery after I have decided on earth. One key is in the garden of language and this morning, after the vague stars and cars of night have turned back into the everyday, I am reading as the way to enter…
They always meet us at the door and search what we're carrying, before we can go in. It's the same for everybody -routine-but it makes me feel guilty. As if they think we'd be trying to smuggle in something dangerous. The thing is, we don't even realize sometimes, my wife and I. What counts as…
Water, bone, bed, bedrock— whatever is underneath, below what's below. Sudden touchable quiet, shadow of a shadow. Weather. Sadness turning ordinary. Nameless illness coming on. A knock at the door so gentle it could be anything. Distance. The just thing not said, or said too late or said exactly and without mercy. Wind rising. Whatever…
The motel pool wasn't flat as safety. It gleamed like a twisted muscle under an operating room light in Oyster Bay. 1966. I'm fourteen. From my room I hear a machine buzz at night through the smell of chlorine. I don't know what it does. I lie in bed imagining it forces the gravity into…
When I saw the sign for piglets I told my father to stop the car. "I want to buy one," I said, attempting to say this with conviction. The thought of raising a pig over the summer had come as suddenly as the sign. "How are you going to raise a pig when you're so…
Not that you were too young to die, though thirty-five is too young, and not because they killed you in the middle of the night the most premeditated way. Not exactly that you didn't deserve it, either, having shot an old man to death for his rare coins and wasted another for money whose sister-in-law…
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