(from Palmares, a novel) "Did you rent me or buy me?" I dared to ask the silent Sobrieski. He said nothing as we walked across a banana grove toward a long squat building. Near it under palm trees were three slave huts, smaller and not as well constructed as the ones on Azevedo's plantation –…
I know I’m here because these are my hands upon my knees. My eyes that stare at wallpaper I put up six years ago. These bones that lie across the old green couch and tremble during the ten o’clock news, my bones. This is the way my ancestor-Irish-farmers felt, coming in from the fields at…
“Don’t go so fast,” I called, but my father always forgot. Helpless, I reached to clutch his coattails until his hand surrounded mine and towed me on. What knowledge of me did his hand record? What angers were given to my childish keeping — to await this instant, years later, when I’m reproached: “Go slow.”…
(from a novel in progress) Everything has had youth. The two old dogs were lifted into their baskets lined with old wadded rags. If the old dogs were set down wrong, if their legs were folded too severely underneath them, the legs would fall asleep before the dogs would sleep, and in the morning the…
I saw a man in the neighborhood, the neighborhood of my life. Walking, a charming smile — grey jacket, and thought, Do I know that face? It was the old gray jacket I liked, its careless retrograde chic. By little things, our fancy moves. I took a few walks with him. And all fall, yellow…
— for my father I want to do this right, as though there were a right way of walking or sitting still, of staring at stoplights changing or the wincing new moon which, after all, doesn’t care what metaphors we make of it — even a right way to smoke, to hold a cup. I…
"Do you mind if I take my teeth out?" He grinned from the bathroom doorway. Lily leaned against the padded headboard, a fringe of green sheet draped across her breasts. "I try to be a gentleman at all times." His grin broadened to a leer. He would have pinched her buttock again. The left one…
Spring is contained in the chill snow egg of nature. Its coiling green can’t figure out how to die. From my upstairs window I can make out, even at midnight twelve different steeples needling the sky, and white barn roofs, trapezoids, pitches, mansards, all simplified because all snowy — through white lace curtains. There’s more…
My new friend is away for the weekend—the weekend drags by. I want to know exactly what he’s doing. Is the convention exciting? Who are the new people? Is Atlanta as pretty as they say? I’m eager to hear all about it. — What’s he doing now? The weekend drags by. My best friend has…
No products in the cart.