Article

Ghosts

March comes and water moves The river, ponds, brooks open On snowshoes this is the last week You’ll hike down these banks of Rotten snow, the last week bridges Of ice will be there to criss-cross Down stream, the last week the Deer carcass will be pinned between Rocks and white water spray Thru the…

If You Stare

long enough at the branches of the big maple tree a secret eye behind your real eyes will begin to see the face of a woman you don’t know who she is but she looks very familiar perhaps your mother or sister or a lover as the wind moves the branches her lips seem to…

The Mistake

” `In writing about a father,’ my friend wrote me about our fathers, `one clambers up a slippery mountain, carrying the balls of another in a bloody sack, and whether to eat them or worship them or bury them is never cleanly decided.’ “ —Geoffrey Wolff Returning from business trips, your father has always brought…

After Martial

Roblinus is our leading lit- erary pot-shotter (iconoclasm detoxifies a culture and Rob- linus is already a cultural monument) since he is virtuous the pot he shoots can hardly be grass so let us say that the shot must come from a pot which is used to relieve his (distress).

The Answer

Now, at the moment of death, your body reappears everywhere it’s been, so all its positions are simultaneous, united indistinguishably in a single mass that extends from the place you were born to where you’ve ended up. No one else is sensitive enough to you to see this. Because the path of your body intersects…

Great-Aunt Fancesca

“Girl, it’s taken everything in me just to keep myself breathing.” Half then all our chickens picked off by coyotes, the pig gut he salted with strychnine, meant for coyotes, eaten by his own dogs, the burial of the dogs useless against the coyotes, the reburials, the coyote hunters shooting out goats, his stallion breaking…

Versions

after Hardy Why would she come to him, come to him, in such disguise to look again at him— look again— with vacant eyes— and why the pain still, the pain— still useless to them— as if to begin again— again begin— what had never been? *     *      * Why be persistently hurtful— no truth to…