She wondered how to make the new faithful to the original. Everything seemed so much itself, and already something else. Life became thicker and thicker over time. My fidelities to her and to the whole place became extremities of the same god. While she heard voices I was swooning, there was this seduction by the…
for Hayden Carruth When I was a child, there was an old man with a ruined horse who drove his wagon through the back streets of our neighborhood crying, Iron . . . iron. Meaning he would buy bedsprings and dead stoves. Now it seems a blazon for the primitive Pittsburgh of rusted metal and…
Sunlight glimmered on the grass, glinted off the black tombstones ahead of Mrs. Kawaguchi. The cemetery grounds had been newly mowed for the Memorial Day weekend and were damp from yesterday's rain: her heels sank deeply into the earth. Wisps of grass clung to her shoes and she could feel the moisture seep into the…
The long-distance connections fade and rectify like wind tracking the filaments of wire through the echo of the tunnel, the emptiness and silence pushed on up ahead of the great green toy trains rattling and grinding to their stops, so that the notes have to rise even higher, toward ignition, as electric as the switches,…
The body is the herb, the mind is the honey. The heart, the heart is the undifferentiated. The mind touches the body and is the sun. The mind touches the heart and is music. When body touches heart they together are the moon in the silently falling snow over there. Which is truth exceeding, is…
Rain chewed fresh gullies in the ridge road, turning the hard clay dirt to a yellow paste. The ditch overflowed and gray air blurred the low horizon. Dripping tree leaves hung limp and heavy, aimed at the ground. "It'll pass," Mercer said. Coe lit a cigarette and opened the pickup's window an inch. Pellets of…
Divina Trace is a Caribbean novel set on the island of Corpus Christi. It is the story of Magdalena and her mysterious child, believed by the islanders to be half-man and half-frog (crapo). Magdalena is transformed into a miraculous black Madonna later in the book, and she becomes the island's collective goddess and patron saint-worshipped…
We come to each other exactly at the center, the spine of ample fire, and suffer to be revised. Stay with me. Weren't we promised the sheer flame, bright change so clean even our clothes wouldn't smell of smoke, not one hair of our heads would be singed? Yet, just now, didn't the tongues slip…
My cousin's kids are here—or near and living with Aunt Cyn. They can't win. They can't believe their father's dead. Nor I. Why, at Mother's funeral only months ago he said. Have some kids! Lose some weight! Wear better clothes! (Always the Parisian to my hippie.) His kids were what he lived for! Six months…
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