Not many years after Professor Alleman began his teaching career, he had a pretty and rambunctious nun as a student. She told him nothing was worth aiming for except sainthood. When he first heard this opinion, he scoffed gravely, arguing that this might be her personal truth but that it had little merit as a…
They’re kindly here, to let us linger so late, Long after the shutters are up. A waiter glides from the kitchen with a plate Of stew, or some thick soup, And settles himself at the next table but one. We know, you and I, that it’s over, That something or other has come between Us,…
I am a word in a foreign language — Margaret Atwood I am a word in a foreign language, but I don’t know what the word is, so I sit here quietly, an alien to my name. Around me, the hedges rustle. Finches settle on the roof, unaware that nothing has changed, that the…
The van was always cool, even on the hottest days, and when they started it grew cooler still as the wind whipped through the open windows and pelted his naked body. It delighted Isaac to be up so high and to be going so fast, to look down on pedestrians dawdling by the roadside, then…
They were out coursing on Sunday a last time together but they did not know it, the two friends, James Sharkey and Tom Lennon, a teacher and an agricultural instructor. The weak winter sun had thawed the fields soft enough to course the hare on, and though it still hung blood-orange above the hawthorns on…
Strangled women rot in cellars near Dudley Station, ghost after ghost complaining. Guilt of flesh sours me, there are no clues. Terror drools in rags from jagged mouths of busted windows as I stroll past to visit a friend, the last white dude on the block. I ought to scream for the dead who can’t…
They collided south of Nashville, J. Fielding Mount, the accidental man, and his counterpart, Malvina T., the accidental woman. She was headed north and he was headed south, and the switching systems that operate in the senses of these fugitive types failed somehow in the darkness. Or possibly it was an accident meant to happen….
“The people need poetry.” That voice That was last heard asking for warm Clothes and money, also knew the hunger We all have for the gold light The goldfinch carries into the air Like a tang of crushed almonds. “The Kremlin mountaineer” scaled The peak of atrocity, seeking The cold final barbiturate Tablet from the…
We were walking through the shadows of the Adirondacks. I saw so clearly that unfamiliar country, our sudden friendship. You said it couldn’t be that way again, walking that field, the small hands of birch leaves fluttering in the still line of sunset. The one night without a moon seems now the end of summer….
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