When New Yorkers said "train" it meant the subway. As in Count Basie's "Take the ‘A’ Train," you took the "train" to go downtown to Greenwich Village, or uptown to Columbia on Morningside Heights. I took the IRT line to the local stop at 116th and Broadway and got off there to go to college….
Since she's not in a hurry-not ever, anymore-Lydia Zimmer takes time to read the signs. Loose Carrots, Cherry Tomatoes, Pickling Cukes. She nods, stopping her cart by a bin. Purple Top Turnips, Lemon Curd, And she squints, her eyes in the mornings clear but dry. California Seedless. Another cart pushes around her, a young mother…
It takes a needle to complete the job— pick the two choked eyes empty of the thread, pick out the particles of sweater wool. It takes a dark, thin book to tray the pickings (they're hard to gather off her skirt, the floor) and chute them in the trash can; takes her tea-tin container for…
The minister, humorous, describes their “shacking up for years.” I had tried on his caftan of sheer silk in the hall, thinking it was a bridesmaid’s stole. Our bride in swaths of pink, black— an abstract fabric that makes me think of walls in Florence or Rome, or Petra “rose-red city half as old as…
Because she feels her husband in this breeze Riffling her blouse and housedress, She's outside in the early days of peace. While the sun freckles her arms in Texas, Rows of lights glow on the British airstrips, And Americans drink tea brown as deerskin. She forgives the Soho whores, conjuring instead His high cheekbones and…
1985 Rain. Ten years since we have spoken. Since Ma's suicide, fifteen. Triage of families: who to attend to—the widowed, the childless, the orphaned? When you smashed the kitchen radio all the calm times you played piano went dead too, just another symptom, though you swept up before sending me to my room. On those…
Lee Trambath was a fifty-five-year-old restaurant manager, with three ex-wives and five children. He was a slender, dark-haired man with a trimmed beard that was mostly gray, and he lived and worked in a small Massachusetts town, near the sea. The children were from his first two marriages, three daughters and two sons, grown now…
While his head wouldn't clear a chair seat, the parents' voices traveled on a higher plane, circled like wind, though his mom often stooped down from her rainy mist of perfume to lipstick a kiss upon his cheek, and his dad hoisted him light as a ghost to play airplane among the lamps hanging like…
Father, this night As on so many other nights I envy you. Not as an infatuated child Is jealous of his father— When I was a child I desired your strength; What I saw as your intelligence; A thousand small skills That I have never made my own— I try to imagine The disintegration of…
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