Nonfiction

  • My Week Aboard a UFO!!!

    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…

  • This Is No Language

    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…

  • Holocaust Girls/Lemon

    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…

  • Belongings

    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…

  • Brother

            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.”…

  • Poetry and Manners

    “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…

  • The World and All Its Teeth

    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…

  • Relics of Summer

    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….