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  • In the Garden of the Djinn

    Sarah didn't pause to watch the water-seller scurry from his spot in the shade to the path leading to the ruins and gardens. The shallow copper bowls ringed to the belts crisscrossing his bright red shirt jangled softly and flashed in the sunlight. The water-seller made a show of splashing the ground in front of…

  • The Star Ledger

    Almost time to dress for the sun's total eclipse      so the child pastes one last face in her album of movie stars—Myrna Loy      and Olivia de Havilland—names meant to conjure sultry nights, voluptuous turns across      some dance floor borne on clouds. Jean Harlow. Clipped from the Newark evening paper, whole galaxies      of splendid starlets gaze,…

  • Gulf

    There was a flatiron brick building built to tower over a gasoline station, a billboard against the wall—I don't know, Drink Milk, a white pillar of it filling a glass—a Gulf sign swinging over Princess Street, and at the top of the hill to Garfield Elementary, a bridge over Pennsy railroad tracks, and if a…

  • Uncle Alice

    I pick him up and take him to the beach. He is always the same and always his sameness changes me. It takes him forever to fold his yellow shirt and blue Bermudas and finally sit. Counting rented umbrellas, he calls out their red and green colors, updating the information every minute. Sun closes in….

  • The History of Rodney

    It rains in Rodney, in the winter. But we have history; even for Mississippi, we have that. There's a sweet olive tree that grows all the way up to the third story, where Elizabeth's sun porch is. Butterflies swarm in the front yard, in the summers, drunk on the smell of the tree; but in…

  • Hospice

    Frayed cables bear perilously the antiquated lift, all glass and wrought iron past each apartment floor like those devices for raising and lowering angels of rescue in Medieval plays. Last night the stairwell lamps flickered off and I was borne up the seven floors in darkness, the lift a small lit cage where I thought…

  • Killing Flies in Georgia

    I go only part way back tonight, sidetracked by fly buzz and the lies of old letters, and then Blotchy starts killing flies again and all the years between do their crumbling act, off-stage voices whispering cues I can't quite catch—wind and rivers, dead time plucking corroded wires. The light changes and we're in that…

  • Jeanne

    The insistent logic of rain makes you turn from the window and try once again to read the book that made you cry when you were thirteen, the age the Maid of Orléans saw St. Michael ride down from the flaming sky and tell her to mind her mother and always be a good girl….