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  • Lunch At Bruno’s

    For you it was not much of a time, and you sat calmly waiting for it to end and dissolve you on into the walk through wind back to the office building; waiting for it to be past and just a dim memory of a long table of vaguely chuckling faces; waiting for this one…

  • Paddy Madigan

    He stood with his cap in his hand, very conscious of the mud on his wellingtons because she had somehow suddenly looked down at them as if they smelled. She stood with her hand on the key in the door, her school books under her arm, looking directly at him so that he dropped his…

  • Frost Flowers

    Sap withdraws from the upper reaches of maples; the squirrel digs deeper and deeper in the moss to bury the acorns that fall all around, distracting him. I’m out here in the dusk, tired from teaching and a little drunk, where the wild asters, last blossoms of the season, straggle uphill. Frost flowers, I’ve heard…

  • El Zoo

    for E.B., 1911-1979 We had to hurry to catch the open silver train that jingled the rim of the park. It was early, Sunday, summer-hazy, and we imagined we were the only ones around: only also the quick Catalonian boys — jumped from the red hibiscus hedge, and ran along the rail, and grabbed expertly…

  • After One

    He told me, at eleven, that he was angry at women and though he didn't blame them exactly, he'd been driven to the point where he just made himself presentable enough to get laid once in awhile. I thought he was very presentable and I wasn't surprised when I found out later in the evening…

  • A Victory

    “Surely in a brutal job-ridden, Puritanical, Billy Grahamized America, poetry of pleasure, describing the six or seven lovely things you did that day, is a victory of sorts.” —Robert Bly For instance planting the seed called six or seven,      lovely in itself, borderline, especially considering the six or seven layers of sleep            we had…

  • Flahrida

    Essentially, he wrote, my life has been a burst of failure. Success lies in a political act, but the best he could think of at the moment was sabotage, putting sugar in his neighbor's gas tank. The Mercedes would shine on the outside, but the guts would be corroded. He considered his need to find…

  • Camp Evergreen

    The boats like huge bright birds sail back when someone calls them; the small campers struggle out and climb the hill to lunch. I see the last dawdler vanish in a ridge of trees. The whole valley sighs in the haze and heat of noon. Far out a fish astounds the air, falls back into…