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  • The Twins

    I saw the wind tilt the corn: Will and Humility, just an image. The sugarcane cut at the same height, the field freshly burned smelling of flan, the bittersweet roots in my house.

  • Trespass

    Katie had already made plans to go to Texas with the baby. Her going didn't have anything to do with Fisher hitting her. On the other hand, she wouldn't change her plans, even though her eyes were black in the morning; even though he cried and said he'd sat up all night in remorse, thinking…

  • Upon an Eunuch: A Poet

    After Marvell's Latin Though alien to the pleasures of women, unfit to plunge your sickle into the virgin crop and sin in the usual fashion, don't think yourself unmanly! Recognition shall be eternally pregnant by you, you'll ruin nine sisters (having lured them from their mountain), and Echo also — knocked up often — will…

  • Make Me Hear You

    When my Aunt Lera — tiny now, slow moving and slow talking — wanted to tell me about her life, she began by saying, “Curtis and me had just one . . . year . . . together.” Curdiss (the way she says it) was a genial great man by all remembrances of him, and…

  • Not Modern

    The air conditioner was broken again. Cynthia unscrewed one side from the window and lost interest in fixing it. Now the celery was chopped and the lettuce, cored and cleaned, lay draining in a puddle of water on the sink. Anna hadn't moved her things out yet so Cynthia could still use the good knives….

  • Reading Jane Austen at 3 A.M.

    “Elizabeth passed the chief of the night in her sister's room.” He rode a dark horse through the land of nightmares, his hair pulled back so tight his eye's couldn't close. Elizabeth feared for her sister Jane who was kind to strangers. The land of sisters neighbors the land of English country houses. A letter…

  • What To Do

    You are far away, Space dipping and swaying in time, And I have something to say But do not know just how. If I could speak in light (Eight and a half minutes from sun to earth) I would, words on solar wind, Lighting up the polar sky, Curtains curving, Rivers of noun and verb….

  • Familiarity

    When, as a child, I spelled the lines on the stones around me where lay those peaceable strangers for whom the essential mood was a sweet-tempered quietude (since here they had resigned not only the strength of flesh but all their tears and anger, subsumed in a common ground — no speech to soothe or…