“You’ve got yore head up yore ass and it’s a good thing you got a cellophane navel to see where yore goin’,” says some dude by the jukebox. Many of us have learned this is not an insult. His vision is crystal clear: one part Roadrunner, two parts locker room hosanna, one part Donna in…
( – The Horse Latitudes are a region of unusual calm, lying in the North Atlantic Ocean. When sailing ships were becalmed there, the crew used to throw overboard cargo and horses. Thus lightened, the boat could take advantage of whatever wind there might be.) What does the sea want, my clothes, my keys, my…
Don’t ever hold on to anything! Let it go! Let it go! And you’ve got it. -Claire “Don’t lay your trip on me, ladies. I don’t care if you’ve got a headache, a muscle hurts, your old man has split with another chick, or what your dreams are. . . Drop your shoulder! Stop…
“I’m so tired of empty promises I could just blow up,” she said on First Avenue where you knew it was spring because the sirens sound light-hearted, and Holly was drinking her Campari with soda. Personally, I had a Bullshot, and drank it like a man personally on his way to the gas chamber. But…
A baby, transparent blue, crawls up my shoulder, claws digging into me. I gave birth to it. And now I have to take the baby home and show the father. He won’t like it when he sees the film on his son’s eyes, when he sees this blue furless cat as his only inheritor.
Richard Yates was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1926. He graduated from the Avon School in 1944, served in the last years of World War II, and until 1952 worked at a variety of jobs, ranging from newspaper rewrite man to freelance ghost writer to publicity writer. He has taught at the New School…
Each face strikes a different hour in the heart Days last tolling will be your’s (Its profile’s panels on which are sleep-lacquered eyes The golden flights and returns of an unblemished wound) Like a blind person reading smoke signals, I touch The face foretold as your’s (It’s like a boney honey in the sunset, pale…
I know nothing of the soil. I have never dug my hands into the earth or planted a seed. I was eighteen before I saw the Big Dipper. The flowers are like slide rules, alien instruments. No matter what I touch my hands are clean. Now, at night, when my wife and children are sleeping…
I told you all I know holding on to your arm looking in windows city after city whispering, murmuring with whom and when and the way we did it. You smiled. Desperately unzipping my dress at the school for the blind I show a breast, a thigh, mad eyes, while they march by in twos,…
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