It was barely daylight when she left him on the porch. Hearing her stir, he’d gotten up, followed her around the house, his hair a mess, his eyes sunken, sleep-deprived. “Mama,” he said to her, a thing she relished, because up until Charles went to prison, he never called her this. “What’s that?” she said….
for Dr. NCB I’ve known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. —from “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Langston Hughes She took her time, walking like a fawn, careful not to make a twig snap. It was getting dark, but she could still see plenty. The voice grew and rose, and was the color of mint, like what…
The swimming pool was empty because there was a crack in its side that needed to be patched, so Emma used it as a hideout when she wanted to get high. Bundled up in her purple down parka and a pair of silver Uggs, she would squat on the cement near a moldy accumulation of…
The sun hadn’t been up an hour when Angelina and Pablo Ramos tiptoed into the surf at Miami Beach, he sporting his ridiculous plastic nose guard, she in a petaled bathing cap, the rubber strap tight against her chin. The only sound besides the gentle wash of the tide was the fluttering of two seagulls…
The day Judy had kittens, Carl Bernstein came to my house. The veterinarian had called it a hysterical pregnancy. Sometimes a cat will think she is pregnant and bloat up, but it’s all in her head. The vet was so definite about this. Two of the kittens were white and one was a calico. Carl…
Reading a prolific writer is like visiting a big city. In Thomas Lux, readers find their own districts. For some it is his literary and historical poems or his obsession with maps or language itself that runs throughout his oeuvre, or the poems of social satire, like “The Happy Majority” or “The Nazi at the…
I’m fourteen and I ride a silver bike with knobby tires through a suburban landscape filled with cul-de-sacs. Fast as a mongoose. Jeans that grip my thighs and ankles. Checkered sneakers. Black turtleneck and a puffy, emergency-colored vest. The air smells like firewood because every house has a chimney and every chimney is burning. I…
1. Sweets My father was a dentist, so I was allowed only one sweet a day. The reasons for this restriction were not mysterious. The water in our town wasn’t fluoridated. When my father tried to convince his fellow citizens they should add this chemical to the well, they accused him of fomenting a Commie…
Every month, there were two or three phone queries like this one. Someone had bought a Monet at a yard sale in Weaverville or found a Grecian urn in a woodshed. One deranged caller claimed he’d discovered the missing arms of the Venus de Milo. Others wanted him to evaluate folk art, hoping some elderly…
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