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Facts

For my father In your orange flight suit, you approached the Renault we knew might stall after a hard winter freeze. With your pilot’s hand, you turned the engine. When it caught, I ran down the walkway you had shoveled. Cinderella lunch-box under my arm, I climbed in the frozen capsule, and waited for you…

Rumors of the Turning Wheel

I lived among a people who said, pig, for luck. They might have said stork or      flounder for these beings were familiar to them, as were rat and donkey. But they said, pig. No doubt from ingrained habit. Real pig, fella. Some pig you had, my friend. What pig. Good pig! Hey, have a piggy…

Fiction

I am a fictional character. However, you would be in error to smile smugly, feeling ontologically superior. For you are a fictional character, too. All my readers are except one who is, properly, not reader but author. I am a fictional character; this is not, however, a work of fiction, no more so than any…

Teaching Shriek

I don’t know. They are young, their souls are undeveloped. My own soul is no bigger than a thumbnail, my own soul at 42 is a half-moon on a thumbnail for one of those towns that fit in a crystal globe where anybody can shake down snow. There’s an opening for God in those towns….

On A Beach Near Herzlia

On the day that his brother Nachman died, Nathan Malkin, a wealthy sixty-four year old American, was walking along the beach of a nature sanctuary in Israel. He did not find out about his brother's death until three days later, when he returned to his home in Ein Karem, a small village near Jerusalem, and…

Snapshot

While history is unforgiven . . . Delmore Schwartz Daughter stands with her hands in her furs. She has told Dad about her nude modelling, has the check to cash. Dad himself has seen naked women standing as if their lovers’ paws had just left their hips, caressing them to their smoothness. He’s seen them…

Days of Awe

I used to dislike shopping, the rushing to too many stores, all the details to remember. Now it's almost pleasant. I shop in the morning when the stores are uncrowded and the early light gleams off the beige brick and glass of the store-fronts. Since Joshua and Miriam are grown and gone, there's less to…