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  • 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…

  • Laughing Africa

    Nights in the barn, the clean astringence of urine steaming into the tendrils of a dungfire, the cattle sleeping their own way, and me mine, despite the puppies tied to the housepost, their lean mother snapping, the only      window stuffed with straw. To keep out snakes? No. Reic shifts at watch. To block the cuckold's…

  • Covering Home

    Coach discovered Danny's arm when Danny's parents were splitting up at the beginning of the season. For a while it didn't seem that Danny would be playing at all, but Coach called him at home where he was staying with his father and told him he needed his "natural curve and pretty good heat," said…

  • Photographic Conversations

    for Roy De Carava For a boy on the street in 1920 you don't need art supplies, some colored chalk for hopscotch, the pigeontoed balls of the feet. At the Guggenheim you don't figure a white dress on a black woman's wedding day is really subject matter for the Family of Man, but she enters…

  • My Name Is Snow

    I want to report to you that in my name, SUE ANN OWEN, I have found the word SNOW. I can also spell out without much trouble the animals that dare to live there, SWAN, EWE, and that old SOW, though the SNOW makes it quite cold for them. This is not to mention the…

  • Under Mounting Pressure

    “O Marcel,” she says to me, “O Marcel, do you know the way out of this pool? I am very tired of swimming about here.” A gale from her shoulder left me in dishabille. I was in dishabille anyway as I was just back from the kaleidoscopic society. I was just there to salute her…

  • Song

    Long brown fingers on the yellow keys. Fingertips pressed to silent chords, audible only to him. Ivory cool against dry skin. Again, tries; smiles. The click of hammers falling soundlessly. The old man looked up from the piano and grinned. "’I am that I am,’ the Lord God said." Woke up this mornin', blues walking…