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  • After A Day In the Country

    —on the film by Jean Renoir My wife says they might be Laurel and Hardy: the thin, future son-in-law, Anatole, and the fat father of his Henriette, who clown with fishing poles at the river's edge. Pike! the fat one says. And the thin one—Did you say: the shark that lives in fresh water? Cuts…

  • A Song for Stolen Bread

    Here's the green delivery truck pulling away, here's the black nest of fumes. Hungry, awake before the birds, we crawled out from an abandoned car, from a lean-to or an all-night john, through the hole in a chain link fence or a tunnel burrowed in thicket, just two or three of us, rubbing our bellies,…

  • Lou Labonte’s Inn

    Louis Labonte in the fourth grade had a cherub's round smile, Bugs Bunny teeth, and his father owned Lou LaBonte's Inn, perched on a high embankment, three white-shingled stories, facing the snowed Sierra in all seasons for those who cared to look. Behind was the Weimar Sanitorium, which for many years helped victims of tuberculosis…

  • Dead Air

    Better to have three announcers trip over each other's tongues than let silence go out like a lethal gas over the airwaves, as if silence were anything but a figment of our imaginations— when one sound stops another is always right there to take its place, so where would we ever have heard it— even…

  • Processional

    Times like this, when gnats wheel in light above the magnolia, I believe I'll return to this life, that you will return. I will be the battered woman in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, who hobbles to the interstate with a girl child in the rain, who picks up a ride and counts the bells of sage…

  • Indirect Objects

    You'd think we'd be used to it, but it's an odd party, all of us in one room, the world in the other, language in its white gloves circulating with finger-foods and billets-doux—for you? For you? What to do but take its word for things —our humble servant, our only foreign correspondent, making some kind…

  • Surfer Days

    Those were strange days, when we were kids Says the bartender I remember this one kid I met Doing construction down at Huntington Beach Told me he used to work for some drug dealer Like the guy was thirty-five and bald The way I'm getting myself And Mikey was some blond god, Irresistible, so his…

  • When the Train Comes

    —for Cecil Allouise Knott, my grandmother: Those who love us are the best teachers. The blackened window fogs above the drainboard. She sighs and cannot see the holly berries she will pin to her dress in the morning. She brushes strands of blue hair with a rubber glove and scalds the knives and forks repeating…