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…
Late August, and the pond is holding the summer's heat close to shore where leaf-litter has begun to form; even out at the center of things there are pockets of warmth deep beneath a canoe short-roped to a slab of scrap iron heaved into place once again on a scrub-topped boulder barely covered by water….
Borrowing his grandfather's reading glass the boy next door takes time to educate us, summoning us for safety off the grass to squat on concrete round his apparatus, the tool aforesaid and a random sliver of paper. Now he tilts the glass to catch a single dart from summer's bursting quiver, training it on his…
Below the barn where you practiced smooking cigarettes for days till you could do it in public like an old hand, where at twelve you lay in secret with your cousin and couldn't kiss her no matter how willing you both were, you stood that day looking back, the field perfect with snow behind you….
My foot, like a magic. bird in some fable, cleft open so suddenly, so gently— only my eyes awaken, seeing this new spring, this red, improbable river, this narrow tongue wagging where never was a mouth. Still, no pain, I walk on, until I wear the ocean's blue shoes, my ankles white with salt, and…
Ten below and falling, a record snow, wind— cold this deep this late, man, nothing crawls out from under. Logpiles, fences, hedges, trees, likely some of the innumerable neighborhood children are stalled under identical humps of snow. Each chimney flue stuck like a breathing tube through each snowcaked roof lisps the thin ascender of the…
Look she said this is not the distance we wanted to stay at—We wanted to get close, very close. But what is the way in again? And is it too late? She could hear the actions rushing past—but they are on another track. And in the silence or whatever it is that follows them there…
My father likes them hot and grows every variety known to burn the worst. Jalepenos hang in clusters like green bananas down the rows we are walking, our arms full of bread bags. Picking so many of them finally that our fingers sting and our eyes fill with water. “The little yellow ones with the…
The season turns. The trees wound the streets. We too want to be touched. We press a scab to feel the pain. Or tongue that place in the mind which yields a death. Last week, your grandfather. The old coot, 95 and every relative furious and mute by the time he was sixty. So you…
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