The sun hadn’t been up an hour when Angelina and Pablo Ramos tiptoed into the surf at Miami Beach, he sporting his ridiculous plastic nose guard, she in a petaled bathing cap, the rubber strap tight against her chin. The only sound besides the gentle wash of the tide was the fluttering of two seagulls…
The day Judy had kittens, Carl Bernstein came to my house. The veterinarian had called it a hysterical pregnancy. Sometimes a cat will think she is pregnant and bloat up, but it’s all in her head. The vet was so definite about this. Two of the kittens were white and one was a calico. Carl…
Reading a prolific writer is like visiting a big city. In Thomas Lux, readers find their own districts. For some it is his literary and historical poems or his obsession with maps or language itself that runs throughout his oeuvre, or the poems of social satire, like “The Happy Majority” or “The Nazi at the…
I’m fourteen and I ride a silver bike with knobby tires through a suburban landscape filled with cul-de-sacs. Fast as a mongoose. Jeans that grip my thighs and ankles. Checkered sneakers. Black turtleneck and a puffy, emergency-colored vest. The air smells like firewood because every house has a chimney and every chimney is burning. I…
1. Sweets My father was a dentist, so I was allowed only one sweet a day. The reasons for this restriction were not mysterious. The water in our town wasn’t fluoridated. When my father tried to convince his fellow citizens they should add this chemical to the well, they accused him of fomenting a Commie…
Every month, there were two or three phone queries like this one. Someone had bought a Monet at a yard sale in Weaverville or found a Grecian urn in a woodshed. One deranged caller claimed he’d discovered the missing arms of the Venus de Milo. Others wanted him to evaluate folk art, hoping some elderly…
Mornings while I brush my teeth I lay my four-month-old daughter on a towel on the floor of our glassed-in shower, safe and clean. The shower is tiled in button mushroom travertine and features a rainfall fixture and adjustable body sprays. My baby’s cry is a plaintive hollow sound in there. After I birthed her,…
Syria is the country where I first began to hike. I had moved there from the US with my husband in the early 2000s to the approving nods of the elders of my family. Before then, I’d only gone on visits, to see relatives and learn the language. My move was supposed to be a…
Translated from the Chinese by Ting Wang Upon returning home, the first things my auntie saw were two big speckled roosters encircled by net bags. One squatting, the other standing, both appeared fairly sagacious. Once she spotted the roosters, Auntie knew my cousin was back. She looked carefully at the ground—maybe the roosters had good…
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