The night Davis and I told our father we wanted a bomb shelter, I sat in silence at the dinner table, listening for sounds from my mother's bedroom. I watched my father butter his bread. I watched Davis sort through his 3-D cards, whose deep focal views-a fisherman with the Hoover Dam behind him, a…
I lift my blouse and pop a breast into his mouth. Clever with a grin, a ring of eight pearly teeth like beads on a rattle, he is careful not to bite the hand that feeds. He closes his eyes, anxious to settle down and begin the slow swim back to the primordial waters, sluggish,…
For the gain of heaven in the zip code of our area, we need a miracle. Do the red-winged blackbirds that fly past Rick Brothers Propane Gas, and Dinette Beautiful signal a change? And the green anemic trees that sprout like acts of faith on the side of the road, what do they say to…
She comes out in a white suit of stovepipe pants and short tight jacket and, under the jacket, dark lingerie. She has the habit of throwing her head back and laughing, revealing the split at her two front teeth. Her lips are cherry red and her hair white (for now) and she makes, together with…
I'm teaching my neighbor's six-year-old the subtle art of deception—how to catch minnows empty-handed in the brook out back. The trick, I explain, is to work both hands together, fooling the fish into sensing a threat with one, sweeping it backwards into the other. As I draw one out of the water, I ask him…
San Antonio, Texas, 1990 In the Crockett Hotel dining room, a chalk-faced man in medalled uniform growls a prayer at the head of the veterans' table. Throughout the map of this saint-hungry city, hands strain for the touch of shrines, genuflection before cannon and memorial plaque, grasping the talisman of Bowie knife replica at the…
In the cultural shake-up of the last decade, it has become increasingly popular to attack both the academy and poetry. The assaults on the university have come from both sides of the aisle: new ethnic and group definitions have led to strong progressive critiques of what were taken to be standard curricula and established canons….
Phantom of the Opera and Frankenstein, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Last Man on Earth—at fourteen, I could have been the last for all they cared, still no luck with girls—and so spent each Saturday afternoon at the Towne with blacks and whites I had fallen in love with, at home with the…
By the time we first met, you were the big-hearted poet, big in every way, breast and head, wrists and calves, but largest in the heart. And deep in the eye, grey like your hair, unlike those areas through which you moved as if on glass, unyielding in your big, gentle way, no longer that…
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