The duende got into my head by the back staircase, a gypsy girl-child dressed in red with an old man’s face. My bedroom turned bitter cold. There were banging noises, loud knockings in between the walls. Things left their places. My comb crawled across the bureau, clicking like castanets. My grandmother’s ivory-backed mirror cracked itself…
I’m a cipher. Before that, I was a loose cannon. Before that, I was a zealot. I preached on the street corners. I accosted strangers in subways to tell them I had good news for them. Before that, I worked on the assembly line in a fireworks factory. I stuck fuses in firecrackers and poured…
I have had just about all I can take of myself. —S. N. Behrman There’s a rose bush outside, like the one by the kitchen where Serena some evenings uncovered a pasta dish, beyond exquisite. My new wife and I would inhale its perfumes and sigh. Not like Adamo, her husband, who’d barely touch it….
Translated from the Yiddish by Maia Evrona Like women who are loved to the fullest and are still unsatisfied, and go through life with laughter and with rage in their eyes of fire and agate— so were the years. And they also appeared to be as actors, hesitantly performing Hamlet before the market; as…
1. A finger is cut from a rubber glove And clamped as a tourniquet around my toe. The gouging ingrown nail is to be removed. The shots supposed to have pricked and burned The nerves diabetes has numbed never notice. The toe, as I watch, slowly turns a bluish Gray, the color of flesh on…
Canny has always been an Irish word to my ear, so too its cousin crafty, suggesting not only an appreciation of close-work, fine-making, handwrought artistry, but a highly evolved reliance on one’s wits to survive, stealth in the shadow of repressive institutions, “silence, exile, and cunning,” in Joyce’s admonition, ferret-sly, fox-quick, silvery, and elusive. Craft,…
As for the fly I chased around the bathroom with a towel that night, swatting, slapping, thrashing, pounding, kicking with one foot the toothbrush cup onto its side, dislodging the tea curtain with a misplaced elbow, unable for all my efforts to terminate his gallant loops and arabesques, his beeline dives and fighter-pilot vectorings, his…
Pit yourself against gutted ships, against the lips of those you love the least, against the hollows where quails spend their lives. Do not sleep. Do not take shape. Ambush the soft armies of seas and the singular face of an adjacent cliff. Scream the way everything screams. Find a small longitude to stitch along…
Better a monosyllabic life than a ragged and muttered one; let its report be short and round like a rifle, so that it may hear its own echo in the surrounding silence. —Thoreau A life: pared to the bone. Think of a room with no chair,…
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