I stood as long as I could on the edge of the pole house, one finger on reality, storms I could count, and a cup of milk in my other hand like a virtue I did not possess but nevertheless, took to my grip. As to the piñon and scrub oak at my feet I…
My house was a house of winds, and my father was of the wind, and we were of the earth and we were torn by him, we were stripped by him, by the bellows of his body, by the twisting of his voice coming shaking, elemental, before the kitchen table where we sat like stones…
Half the town fits in the rearview mirror. One day the mirror falls from the windshield and the town shatters like a bad dream. You know how it is. One day you move to California. There is this club in Santa Monica—a renovated basement where you dance to songs about money. Your accomplice says there's…
I keep my eye on the desert room floating with silver and black blades, the shadows of date palms in the hands of the vanished magician. He is silent, missing repeatedly the lady in the white box. She's made an austere retreat into yet another nothing, into my own approval of not-doing in this heat!…
If it's appendicitis, you're in trouble out here on the Isla de Malhado. Despite bright stars there are disturbances. It's three o'clock in the morning. Ashore on the Isla de Malhado the shipwrecked Spanish came to no good end. It's three o'clock in the morning. If it's not an emergency, go back to bed. The…
for Chris Benfey Before sleep last night I lay there in a reverie over L.A., and dreamt of it all night and put off getting up for fear it would go away. All my fears of flying dissipated at the thought of cruising in the air to Los Angeles. I was happy there. I said…
I knock over the bottle of wine. It pours over my feet, cold, leaving a purple stain. This is private land. He is holding a gun. He tries to see between my thighs. The wine is sticky. I don't move. What are you doing? Screwing out here? Like we're the crazy ones. I want to…
Lewis Houser and his thirteen-year-old son, Nathan, were hiding behind a toolshed in the tragic state of Missouri. They had been like that for over an hour-waiting-ready to salvage their lives and take what was theirs. "Ground rule number one," Lewis had told Nathan earlier, "is no talking, not even a single word, because the…
. . . The border Halves a piece of paper into here and hereafter. A man, himself a fascicle of borders, draws a map and can't stop drawing For fear of bleeding, smudging, disappearance. When the map is complete the page will be completely Obscured by detail, then a third howl. Three things…
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