The day the shortstop died, Katie Mays was in the kitchen, arranging a sprig of baby's breath, fresh from the garden, onto her father's breakfast tray. Merely glancing at the front-page headlines, she opened the Daily Oklahoman to page five-sports scores and standings-and placed it neatly next to the cut-glass pitcher of orange juice. More…
Every day, the man next door locks his wife out in the yard. Under August's tattered cottonwoods she talks back to steel guitar chords that slide out of loudspeakers strapped to the cyclone fence— a slurred contralto, lyric from the Love Generation already twenty revolutions gone under a sun that will never be younger. The…
It is two o'clock on a Friday afternoon in April. The willows along the river north of town are a tender grasshopper-green; patches of henbit and bitter cress sprout like tufts of hair in the winter-weary yards. In the basement of the library on Main Street, Miss Lucy McKewn, age thirty-six, assistant librarian, cleans up…
MORNING Alvin Bishop rises at dawn and faces east, framed in his bedroom window, a thin, naked man, skin the white of flour, hair wild from sleep and as dark as the earth. The sun's light, but not the sun, is visible to him, as if the thing itself were buried nightly beneath the rows…
It was torture. A manner of speaking that anyone might fall into after a hard walk in the woods, say, or a day's labor in sunlight, bone-wracking cold. Or concerning that day in the schoolyard years ago when an older boy twisted your arm behind your back until something cracked, and you said what you…
Like held lanterns, wavering, almost gone out, the cows' white faces turn towards me as their bodies pivot, needles to magnetic north. Squared off, they still, and stare. I can barely make out the nostrils' dilation trying to forage my scent from the currents of air, or the draped-velvet black of their coats, its crushed…
When finishing graduate school at Harvard, Manny Chokra met with instant and astonishing success. At the age of twenty-six, quite by chance, he made two new discoveries in the field of neurological physiology, and though his dissertation was barely complete, universities all over the country were offering him jobs. Manny accepted a tenure-track position at…
These ruins reach to sea, continue right through surf. This harbor long-disused, once frenetic, is famous for anchors atilt, hooks to snare more of those hulls that loll in sea floor's vast litter. Right over this wreckage sailed those off for Gallipoli, boys of good cheer. Today all's calm and we picnic out on a…
In a paint-speckled smock Monika is cutting cheese, her short, sparrow-colored hair falling forward. From the barn kitchen window, she doesn't see the owl on a branch turning its head side to side. Gazing at the wall, she considers the line between figurative and real. the willed silences of art. She wants distilled meanings and…
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