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…
he house on a dirt road, a stream running by it. In the dream I am always fighting to stay. Someone tries to move me out, an ex-love, someone who thinks my things should remain in boxes, someone who would knock down a wall, make guest rooms, “brighten the place up a bit.”…
“Ages with a highly developed decorum find verse a relatively easy medium. Recent ages have clearly a low decorum and have run toward prose.” -R. P. Blackmur, 1951 Imagine what Blackmur would have said about our age, circa 1994. Toward what does an age run with almost no decorum? Toward self-indulgence and the collapse of…
I’m very worried when I see the boy from my writing workshop, gloomy Chico Lopez, strolling down St. Mary’s Street with Julio, who used to live next door. This looks like a bad connection. They’re talking busily with their heads together, carrying sacks. I’ve never seen Chico look so animated before. Is it just that…
The fonts in all the churches are dry. I run my fingers through the dusty scallops of marble: not a drop for my hot forehead. The Tuscan July heat is invasive to the body but not to the stone churches that hold onto the dampness of winter, releasing a gray coolness slowly throughout the summer….
His erection startled me. At first, it seemed merely to point me out, acknowledging my part in nothing more than the simple and various human desires in our encounter: the desire to be loved and to be healed, the desire to be naked before another and thus to be understood utterly and to be wordlessly…
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