The dead spoil every picnic. The way they lie back on the grass like exhausted lovers staring up at the cloud packed sky pretending to see things there that we don’t see. The dead refuse the cold fried chicken, the potato salad that was their favorite. They keep their mouths clamped around a giant guffaw….
When he left her, she took what was given. After a while, she came to love the second one — the man, house-builder — suited more for her body. But at night, when she lay beneath him, it was leaves she listened for, not the stilled wood of roof. She never spoke of her first…
Among the women by the road one stepped aside and joined me at the stuck cart, the dog-soft silk of her breath at my ear as she stood behind me with her arms raised, and we all put our backs to it— then stopped awhile, taking our bread and cheese. I rinsed my mouth with…
A man and a woman are both growing their hair. The woman believes her hair will grow faster because she stands on her hands a great deal, walks to the mailbox on her hands, vacuums that way, mows the lawn with her feet. The man has never lost a contest to his wife so, of…
No deer entered the orchard this evening, though mist gathered, pressed into the hill, and the moon pulled slowly over and away. It is ludicrous to think of the apple trees longing, of the apples themselves scented to draw down deer. It is ludicrous; but what is one to think mornings, finding beneath the trees,…
Suddenly, the magical horse looks ordinary, the black bale of his chest diminished—and the puffy cat stops, mid-prowl, where each bare twig of the poplar stands forth from the main stem like frightened hair: the voice is breaking its year-long spell. And in the garden pool, upside-down, a young man’s lips are glittering; he holds…
1 First morning since she was born I have not nursed her, and I am dissolving among the blasted hearts on the psychiatric ward a man shudders with cold under many blankets a blind catatonic is wheeled back from the shower and now a woman approaches with snapshots and knitting she is concerned why am…
What she learned in the trees was beyond him; emerging, she faltered a moment in the hem of shade, her garment. In that shifting mix of light and dark she appeared before him newly, presenting in the broken fruit what rose in her eyes, and beseeched him.
The morning harvest startles me with its generosity. Feedcorn spills over the wooden wagon, the milkweed has fattened and waits, calling touch me, touch here! Buckled up, shuffled into pairs my children challenge the very air in front of them. They grant my knees an obedient hug, they march away, so temperate, so prudent with…
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