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  • Gathering

         for Heather Remember gathering eggs in the morning feeding the shells to the hens at noon? I had forgotten how we gave them back to themselves. The turtle"s nest, how we walked around her ring of stones? The Lincoln Fair? How lost I was when you were, how I looked for you already…

  • Characters

    Flo knew the best way to kill a chicken and it was this. Hang it head downwards, hold on to it, and go in with your knife. Slit the roof of the mouth and the upper part of the beak. Go for the veins that cross each other at the back of the throat. If…

  • Davidson Among the Chosen

    Hannah was her usual reticent self on the subject. "I don't trust them," was all she'd say. Reticent and cryptic. "What the hell you mean you don't trust them?" Brian kept asking her. "Nothing. I just don't trust them. That's all." Brian was trying to find his sneakers. Hannah was no help on that score…

  • The Wife’s Tale

               J. O. BEALE J. O. Beale is a horse's ass which anyone can see he smells like something in the grass I couldn't finish the thought because I couldn't find the rhyme, though I wrote seven or eight rhyming words in the margin: free, sea, be, tree, me. Even Don key. None of them…

  • For the Father

         (later acquitted of the drowning) There was the pond, trout-filled, dark green. Child-shaped for the father since the child was born. But deeper. There was the sour brown meadow, the blue jays moving against his ears. The father walked through, lonelier than anyone. There was the huge doll-son he carried, breathing heavy in his arms….

  • What is Left to Link Us

    I want to tell you about the undoing of a man. I did not know him very well. It is only the conditions that led directly to his collapse that I know well enough, the handful of episodes that seem to me pertinent. I in fact was present at the critical moment – when matters…