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  • The Apple

    My father looked very healthy on the day of his death. There was radiance in his face, light in his eyes, his cheeks were ruddy with a good circulation of blood. It was December 6th, and there was a slanted snowstorm outdoors. When you looked through the window, you had a feeling that the whole…

  • Tanner and JunHee

    They are together and asleep between cotton sheets when the phone rings. Early morning bleeds blue through tinted shades. Tanner reaches back to the endstand for the receiver without rolling over. He recognizes the heavily accented voice of his father-in-law instantly, though he has not heard it in years. The line is thick with fuzzy…

  • Lights From Belle Isle

    A summer night, Detroit about to suffocate on its own exhausts, I headed west on Victor looking for Tessie. Leaning late in her window, Mrs. Kessarjian across the street was still in her black dress as if waiting for business. Hammer and Borka and their gangs on the corner of John R and Victor banged…

  • On Cynthia Schad

    In language both sensitive and terse, "Close to Autumn" explores the feelings of a motherless child. Edie is seven and long accustomed to living alone with her agreeable, devoted young father. She shyly admires his new girlfriend, too, and comes to cherish moments when the three of them can be together. But she is unaccountably…

  • On Dana Gibson

    Dana Gibson has the real gift, an ability to see and to think and to write in a way that is truly unique and original. Her prose makes even the most ordinary of events take on an almost edenic clarity and freshness. Sometimes her language seems Nabokovian to me in its lilt and life, and…

  • The Tuba Lesson

    To vibrate out a tone of lasting woe; To send a foggy message, Brewing a mellow humor in the sharp, Naked unatmosphere of cinder block In the cafeteria; To expel, as though from a great depth, a note. But whose ambitions were these? They weren't mine For more than half an hour. Reflected in the…

  • Close to Autumn

    When she was six she wanted to be a goldfish. She could breathe through clear water and watch the world through glass. But she didn't want to be orange, like her own fish, she wanted to be gold. That was when she lived with her father, and he bought her whatever she asked for. Usually…

  • An Unswallowable Love

    I once asked Lizard whether he too watched the iridescent lights that played across his vision. Whenever I am weary and confused, I shut my eyes and wait as the orbs of yellow and phosphorescent blue creep in from the sides. Lizard said he wished he could slither between my lids. I laughed because I…

  • The Death of God

    A man whose wife's enlarged heart was going learned of a drug That would enlarge the mind. The couple was old, but      enlarging The mind with a drug was a new idea. Make the date late      Eisenhower, early Kennedy. The couple was old, not born in this century, and the woman's      heart, Stretched in girlhood…