For my mother’s fortieth birthday, my father brought home two coats-a Persian lamb and a karakul-and told her to choose between them. She set the boxes on the dining room table and opened the first. When she lifted the coat from the box, the tissue paper fluttered upward like a wing. She tried it on…
It is men who carry the dead in our religion, but my sister and I are adamant and my mother accedes. Stepping over hillocks of soiled snow, my sister and I walk on opposite sides of the casket, borne also by nephews and uncles. The wood digs into my fingers, cuts grooves in the pillows…
Where is the Life we lost in living? -T. S. Eliot When America died, I was passed out and I never noticed. Was it a meteor or an invisible wand that waved past our eyes and blinded everyone? I awoke one morning and electrical maggots were spurting from the mind-control machine in our disheveled living…
Words sat up and behaved when James Merrill was around. Whether poetry or prose, Merrill’s writing always sounded like it fell from a tree, perfect from the start. His memoir, A Different Person, was no exception. In it, Merrill explored his early life as a young poet, a dutiful son, and a gay man in…
There is a new black woman in the English department. Several people told me about her, that she is extremely nice, and that she looks white-like me. The way they described her, I didn’t know what I’d see, though I think I thought to myself, Another “nice” light-skinned girl who knows how to make people…
A bitter Wichita, Kansas, winter day. The air is hard, and everything tempted to appear in an afternoon hour or two of tepid sunlight moves with recognition of that hardness, circles overhead as if turning an adamant mill wheel (crows), or raises a lavish tail the shape-and I would swear the brittleness-of the ice-fronds on…
Because I immigrated to the States from Croatia at the age of twenty, people often ask me why I write in English rather than in Croatian. I give a silly answer that it’s owing to my Achilles’ heel that I do. The less silly-but not tragic-answer takes longer, even though it might start just as…
We are the Holocaust Girls The Holocaust Girls, the Holocaust Girls We are the Holocaust Girls, We like to dig in the dark. -to the tune of “Lullaby League and Lollypop Guild,” from The Wizard of Oz 1. You don’t have to be Jewish to be a Holocaust Girl. But it helps. It…
At twenty, he has square feet and wide bones and thick coarse hair; a smile that, while slow, is generous. You want to pet him. From all the bulk and fur of him you wouldn’t expect his hands, magician hands. Quick. He draws caricatures in charcoal, plays Bach on guitar, juggles bean-bags, and folds colored…
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