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Note: Traditionally, black-eyed peas are served on New Year's Eve. Each black-eyed pea one eats brings luck.      Well! Johnnie thinks. He has his nerve! Crashing this party! What stuck-up conceit! Passing his induction papers around; another Negro whose feet never touch the ground. His name is Melvin Nelson. In his eyes the black of dreams…

Into your scorched apron of tumbleweeds,      and I'm home: Mojave, Arid Mother, stop rocking me;      I'm a man now. Don't hum your berceuse of scorpions;      I'm a man. Can't you see?— Yes, I've noticed the cactus,      with its bristly halo, manages on nothing:      no canteen! Like messengers, like magi, the rattlesnakes      sally from their cool…

There she is in her garden bowing & dipping, reaching stretched with her shears— a dancer commanding forces no one else any more fears. The garden's not enclosed. It encloses her. It helps her hold her bliss. (She is too shy for transports.) It helps keep her whole when grief for unchangeable reasons waits to…

There's a train coming down the pike. We were Hilary, Pat, Lori and me. I haven't thought of them since that day in Abergavenny. We'd set out for Wales, Lori and I knapsack-backed. She with the feather in her purple hat. Hilary and Pat came east and tacked through Dublin to meet us at Abergavenny….

A cold Sunday morning in early December. The first snow. All night long the sky hung heavy with a locked-in gathering flood. Then at dawn the first snow came. The first snow. Looking at the sky, Rachel, who lives twenty blocks away, sees at dawn the first snow come, drawing a veil between her house…

1. She sits reading the end of Hans Brinker, and tugs faded flannel over her tucked-up feet so no bit of them can show. She hears him yell “Damn you! You've made us late again, will you—” and her mother, something too soft to hear. She holds her breath; relaxes: nothing falls. When the doorbell…

this is the woman sons look for when they leave their wives —Leslie Ullman Husband Again tonight he sees her eyes burning in the common flame. Windows, too, give him her image at strange times. He begins to breathe like the first daffodils punctuating the April grass. The miles to work he dreams: she rides…

1. The upraised arm, first clenched, ready to hit, fist clenched and cocked, ready to throw a brick, a rock, a Coke bottle. When you see this on TV, robbers and cops, or people in some foreign alley, is the rock in your hand? Do you shift and dodge? Do you watch the story twitch…