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  • The Ghost of Delmore Schwartz

    I have seen that moon face rise behind my shoulder in the mirror like a bum floating up from the sidewalk bribing his own disappearance with the reminder that suffering reeks to high heaven. Money’s prayers are always answered. The bums go. Delmore stays behind my shoulder as I shave whispering like a dust pan…

  • The Blind Student

    A blind student lives in the room closet to the courtyard. When he descends with his dog we step deftly out of the way and say hello. He is good and his dog is good but sometimes you gasp as he approaches a curb or a group talking with their backs turned and want to…

  • World Enough

    But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence. . . . We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they…

  • Kansas: before the war

    They are everywhere in the wild lights past the hammering of the dawn, the colors shooting off those sounds, and she can talk to them, she says, “communicate” in the same way distant cousins lean over corpses and say something appropriate but inaccurate. Stars cinder where the jungle ends, at the furthest outskirt of the…

  • Bijou

    The film which rumor has made the dernier cri of this year's festival is finally screened. It begins without credits, challenging the audience from its opening frame. Not only has it been shot in black and white, but the black and white do not occur in usual relationships to one another. There is little grey….

  • Milking

    In the darkening barn, one bulb stares, fly-specked. I squat the stool, lean my brow in against her loin. She moans, already dripping in the pail. I inhale the ammonia of hay and urine. It doesn’t clear my head. Instead, a foggy, white river winds through a cheese-green valley, grass still poking through the snow….

  • His Turning

    Your chest and arms around me hang to my clothes. I had forgotten how your curly hair twisted my stomach, how your broad shoulders spiked my body with nerves. You said it was so easy; that you loved the man from the moment your hands touched. And all our problems suddenly made sense. How useless…