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…
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…
No products in the cart.