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At the Barbecue

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…

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…

Communication Theory

The highway was dark, strung with cats’-eyes, red and      yellow, passing My window where my face floated; I watched Your face above the steering wheel, as always, calm to the      bone; Your brown eyes and full lips droop, but the sadness is      genetic only; The space beside your eyes is like a smooth pool. We…