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  • The Beguiling Idiot

    To begin warily, let us say this has to do with words, the appalling paucity, herself talking to herself when she was accustomed to the daily slap and tickle within the ebb of routine. But he was away now visiting his father who was, as they said, fragile, a word she said to herself as…

  • And So

    amid the loved lost causes, the revival of the classics, the classless society, you work on a dirge for the language your grandmother loved you in: snih, trava, lyubov. . .

  • There I Was One Day

    There I was one day in the parking lot of the First Brother's Church on one foot, a giant whooping crane with my left ibex finger against my temple trying to remember what my theory of corruption was and why I got so angry years ago at my poor mother and father, immigrant cranes from…

  • The Lost Child

    The boy could hardly remember a time when he had not been in the car. The car and the driving hadn't really made him forget; they just made it hard to believe there was anything else in the world except them. It was night again. He no longer watched the beads of light in the…

  • Forsythia

    and pussy willows feather framed madonnas. I stand on the dining room table like a lamp, reciting syllables of unbroken light by a poet a century gone— what fine filaments burned whenever I forgot myself. Mother stitches a pillow, nodding her strawberry head. A tipped oak rankles the window. Years later, I enter a room…

  • Bob Summers’ Body

    I never told this—I saw Bob Summers' body one last time when they dropped him down the chute at the crematorium. He turned over twice and seemed to hang with one hand to the railing as if he had to sit up once and scream before he reached the flames. I was half terrified and…

  • Catch You Later

    Leo, I don't think what you did was right. Five years ago you jumped on top of me and made me squirm until I thought my own bones being crushed into my lungs and liver might kill me. But I didn't die; I got used to you instead. Then one day you climbed off. Just…

  • The Fiddle

    It was made to play by itself over telephones on ears that had receivers on clotheslines, on steeplechase frenzy of the tight road, for strings are made of the human kind, hands, and the bowels of music which stretch from the fingers, and into a mother's hair. You can cut the hair so short on…

  • The Wolf

    In winter the wolf lets its hair grow thicker. Thick as a bush unaware of its thorns. And the coat grows darker, the way the meaning of a shadow falls deeper into the darkness of the mind and fear starts its own season. Then the wind sharpens the wolf's teeth the way hunger does. A…