I walk on hooked rugs; my beds are covered with patchwork. Across the road they sell corn and red beans—fresh picked, and the milk in bottles has a layer of cream an inch thick at the top. This was my father’s home I have come back to. My elderly cousin is working her latest jig-saw…
When it snows after a train wreck, I like the people to crawl out and celebrate a little, to think about winter. I like it when they open their battered suitcases and dedicate some clothing to the wind, or when they build a fire and huddle around it, singing . . . Why should they…
The first full moon I wanted to take a taxi home — we were that far apart. The second full moon tides pulled at the beach of our vacation. We made love in a room we couldn’t afford but that had a view. The third full moon you were too tired so we watched television….
1. I want to explain about the broken finger. It is all appetite. Voracious, exuberant, world devouring appetite. When I was five they found me at dawn beside the piano playing chords and weeping. Even when they boxed my ears for putting a thumb on a black key it did not diminish my appetite. I…
By the end of this story, the house next door should be in flames, but that may never happen. In his dream, there is no house. Instead, he has stolen the blueprints. He ignites them with a handful of matches. And now the dream has already changed. It has nothing to do with fire. He…
I enter the kitchen late but there is still liver on the plate less than before so I know the cat stays on unseen within the dark rooms and halls of its home. The blood of the liver has left a map. The skin of the liver itself has become purple and stiff and as…
He’s out of work, he naps Extravagantly, his lines of credit Tighten, his boundaries dissolve, he’s So hung up on her, he counts The rows of wire squares on his screen Windows, he counts Eyelashes, he counts the hours or days Until he sees her Until she breaks the date And he starts again from…
The earth swept clean of creatures not its own: earth, ocean, air, to you do we belong only? No! The long climb up from slime turning on a dime remains, hanging on by a thread to the dead generations, lowly, encapsulated though once I read in TIME, that wisdom of the week we twitchy moderns…
for Pop, my grandfather (Martin Gavin) she told me the story when I was sixteen over whiskey sours whipped up with the white of an egg It was late afternoon a warm rain wriggling down through the soot on the windows the kitchen so warm it felt like summer but,…
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