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The Light That Stops Us

The morning a wind was up but I stopped to look anyway, bent barefoot to a net of flashing crystals, grass tips had picked their green way into a spider's threaded fan spread on the lawn last night— and standing, I saw the bone from inside the raspberry still hung on the stem, that white…

Tall Woman Love

Beal comes in the night. "Auntie!" he says softly with his lips against the glass. The door is latched. Just a thin latch, not meant to keep out something big. Beal taps the glass with his knuckles. "Auntie! It's me!" Among the hairs of a young boy's beard, pimple scars have been carved, concave as…

Beautiful is Hard

To be a boy meant it was only easier to pee in the woods or from a rowboat easier to fit into tight jeans the crooks of trees except for some fat boys and some flat-bellied flat-buttocked girls. To be a boy meant it was always harder to have a beautiful anything: like eyes, handwriting,…

Menasha

It was Menasha, the name in the middle — not Murray — which my Grandmother thought more “American” — in reality Irish, like the ones who left their homes to them. Menasha or Manasseh, the half tribe, brother to Ephraim, son of Joseph- Israel-Jacob's son who blessed not him the elder, but Ephraim, his younger…

A Fresco

All day I've been thinking of the grief on each of their faces, Adam and Eve. The feeling is closest to a wave as it peaks, how it seems on the verge of self-consciousness before it collapses. Their mouths hold a single sound that divides, familiar as rain. The angel points away from the green…

Cumana In August

Cumana in August is not so bad. True, it's winter and the days get shorter. But not because the sun does. Because the rain comes earlier and earlier until one is almost back in his home by noon. The mountains are worse. Invierno: winter wet, summer hot. The rivers swell, creciente; from upriver down, dark…

David

He played a paralyzed man once, before I knew him. He made his own body settle into a position of broken readiness, hunched on the rotting pins of his bones. I thought I'd seen it before: actors in wheelchairs as actors in wheelchairs. But he gave that damage power, a sound in the throat that…

Cultural Exchanges

—for Catherine Tinker When Augusta, the teen-aged empleada, expressed bewilderment at the two friends' behaviour, “Oh, they're North Americans,” the Dona said, implying that explained everything. She stretched, with the telephone parked on the zipper of her overalls. Message-pad leaves were scattered over all the desks and shelves. This house's empleada primarily answered the telephone….