My mother was in the midst of making the beds. The windows were thrown open and the sheets and blankets and pillows were piled up on top of the radiator cover in front of the open windows. A vigorous bedmaker, my mother stripped the beds of their sheets and blankets with an assaultiveness that was…
Don’t let them tell you — the women or the men — they knew me. You knew me. Don’t let them tell you I didn’t love your mother. I loved her. Or let them tell you. Do you remember Rye? — where the small fishing boats, deprived of the receding sea, took the tide out,…
The morning flared the color of blossoming sage fixed in the season’s first heat. Thick with sediment the river flowed over its banks quieting the flats that were always rasping with tiny life. I could still see the circle of rocks, lucid and smudged, where so many times I kindled fires with my son. I…
Elaine looked once more into the mirror, pushing her cheek up with her fingers into a forlorn, lopsided smile. Her palms were wet from brushing her hair. The locker room smelled of rain. The lights flickered; thunder crashed and the sky turned violet. She wiped her palms on her leotard. I can't dance; the dance…
Let me tell you What nothing means. In the boy’s room At the grade school, I stood before the urinal — I was ten, I think — And there before The absolute whiteness Of the cool fixtures, While my pale urine Smacked the porcelain And fell down In the narrow plumbing, I stared straight At…
You have to stop thinking of the 4th of July As a time to bang pots in the back yard And watch for rockets. You can’t expect The food just to be handed to you Hot off the charcoal. You have to stand and talk Through the rippling air to the host with the fork…
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…
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….
It tries to come out of the paper and tear at me With its spider hands and its feet like rakes And its eyes like red targets and its green hair in flames And something else blue and sun-like with rays that Rebecca says Is a vagina. Annie With the Blue Vagina. Though when my…
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