In England, by and large, poets are in the habit of looking backwards and inwards. They are obsessed with the tradition of Auden and Larkin; they write nostalgically (and neatly) about themselves, their childhoods, their love affairs, their politics. There is a whole generation of younger poets who have circumambiated the innovations of Eliot and…
It has rained this afternoon and the landscape is a darker green. Wind rushes up and down the hillside until the field shudders like something alive. I linger at the screen door accepting these gifts watching the evening draw away into one corner of the sky. None of this will ever be quite enough. As…
(a section from a novel-in-progress, The School Book) Eleanor Franklin went home and told. Eleanor is in the seventh grade, and is a little over thirteen years old. She is precocious (which doesn't mean much around the Tigris School because everyone there is precocious) and somewhat hung up on herself, as only children often are….
Rewarded chocolate chip cookies after white ankles at first holy communion. Frankincense and abstinence hand in hand, girl boy girl boy canter to the altar christian doctrine right front wheel. Loose. Catechism question one; who made you? God almighty who at twelve years old can answer that existential phenomenon two; your soul, how must you…
Gracie turned on her side to look at the clock. She could tell by the way the sun struck the window and glowed through the frozen gauze around the bottom of the pane that a hard frost had come at last, that fall was beginning to be what it should be. All night the wind…
( from Part One of Chekov Was A Doctor) It began as liberation. Thursday afternoon we were released early from public school for religious instruction. My mother who could scream without raising her voice screamed, "Abe he disappears, ten years old and I can't keep track, Abe the street! Abe the element!" My father said,…
Dad screwed another cigarette into his lips crossed his legs folded his workman’s arms along his weed-stained lap (you can’t speak now not to him he isn’t here just watch watch him climb over the shed the chubby lawn home. watch my daddy smoke fantasy.)
Every day did not start with Vince awake that early, dressing in the dark, moving with whispery sounds down the stairs and through the kitchen, out into the autumn morning while ground-fog lay on the milkweed burst open and the stumps of harvested corn. But enough of them did. I went to the bedroom window…
"`The loss of clothing,'" Grent reads, "`implies free fall.'" I write this down. He pauses, scanning the page. "`In this general area a thumb was found hanging on a twig.'" I write this down. "`Whom we felt conclusively to be a member of the crew because the tissue was intimately associated with the control panel.'"…
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