My deepest secret but not my weight and credit rating. The not-I burns the day-care center somewhere near the edge of the non-example in northern Nicaragua because pity has a pre-modern ten-year-old face with a hundred and eighty handpainted freckles. My repetitions but not my death. It was either a new car or staying home…
What we wondered as kids about the light in the icebox I'm wondering now about love. The apple digesting itself in the pantry. The corpse in need of a shave. All that goes on when no one's around to see it or say what it means. All the king's horses fed to the dogs, the…
Editing a literary magazine — and this is the first time I have undertaken a project so fraught with hubris — turns out to be a little like buying birthday presents for your loved ones. You tend to get them things you really want for yourself. In making selections for this issue I have been…
I'm not trying to manipulate reality, please put that grain of sand back where you got it, thanks, but above all—way high up, above cities, clouds, classes— to make you see, and me write, the silent tip of the talking iceberg, putting one word in front of another. Not I, but the Gross National Product,…
In Soweto today, two black men, one in the rulers' blue, one in civilian drab—ankle-length britches, a shirt whose once-distinct stripe has faded— faced one another. Each believed the other would take what the believer had—his power, his life— and believed that he, in that instant of history, embodied the force of history. I do…
Hazed with harvest dust and heat the air swam with flying husks as men whacked rice sheaves into bins and all across the sunstruck fields red flags hung from bamboo poles. Beyond the last treeline on the horizon beyond the coconut palms and eucalyptus out in the moon zone puckered by bombs the dead earth…
There is a store, it is an individual, like you, me, a body, corporate, you or I might go into this store and see racks of empty cardboard boxes covered with a picture and with words on the back with the typeface neutral and readable while the title on the front reaches out by some…
Toy tractor under the house, empty clock Plumbing that howls like the sea Within the walls, And the walls dirty-white where the cat rubbed And the child of splashed milk Giggled over a finger game. Sister roaring places. Wet truck. Sky making room for clouds, that black threat Over the grocery, something For Mr. Bandini…
About eight of us were nailing up forts in the mulberry grove behind Reds' house when his mother started screeching and all of us froze except Reds—fourteen, huge as a hippo—who sprang out of the tree so fast the branch nearly bobbed me off. So fast, he hit the ground running, hammer in hand, and…
No products in the cart.