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…
Through the skein of years, I had nothing to fear from this place. How final and brief it would be to disappear from this place. The tangle of driftwood and Coke cans and kelp in the sand made me think of the muddle that drove us (my dear) from this place. An orchard, a vineyard,…
That dog never barked, not a whimper, so it was heaven living next door to Pickwick and his mistress, Elzbieta, the Polish novelist on Brattle Street, my first apartment, my first year out of grad school. Elzbieta escaped the Warsaw ghetto, then worked for the Resistance during the war. What had I accomplished at 24?…
Pain cloisters itself deep in the body like a ladybug nestling into a pinecone. She finds a pinecone split in two, its spine revealed. It is as if she has discovered her own corpse. What force could split a pinecone down the center? Improbable bolt of lightning, bright finger of pleasure? Perhaps it has lain there for years The ashes have drifted She is lost in the pine forest of…
On the park bench You turn the page of a travelogue— Henry James is eating the last of a puffy croissant Near the border of Italy and France. A crumb has attached Itself to his beard—oh, the faux pas Of greeting Madame du Coudray, With his top hat coming off, His bow like a bending…
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