we do not know the name of the river that roils beneath us until we arrive at its shores—until we give reason to pass along or stay there where waters sound like uncut jewels swirling in a tide pool—until the little boats we’ve made fold like kites in a storm—until we’ve come to that point…
A fire has started in the kitchen, and is moving from room to room. There’s just enough time to save the Rembrandt, an original, or the portrait of your wife. You save the Rembrandt, of course, but when you get outside you think it might be possible to save the portrait as well. You dash…
One minute I’m standing in the parking lot behind the De Anza theater. We’re throwing our empties at each other, our smokes turning a whiter shade of pale. The subject is horsepower, and the cars we’re leaning on are Cougars, Mustangs, GTOs. Now and then we rumble off and back again for no particular reason….
He entered the sty, and she cringed. She’d always Remember him, a beast with black hair And blue eyes, a young German, and the sound Of screeching ducks and gunshots in the barnyard Where treacherous neighbors had gossiped Away the good frightened family who’d stashed her And hers like livestock with souls, butchered then Or…
Helen Stetter Born into an age of horse-drawn wagons that knocked and rocked over rutted mud in the hot wake of straw, manure and flies, today she glides to her birthday party in a chair with sparkling carriage wheels, along a lane of smooth gray carpeting that doesn’t jar one petal of the corsage…
The New Choice Pregnancy Testing Kits are hung along the ramp-up to the register. The woman ahead of me would pass hers with flying colors. She’s huge and sighing, the kids in her cart keep eying my candy. I recognize the cashier—she’s the girl who used to work at the Video Cave that closed. We…
Go tell the President: the wagon trail was lost out there beyond the sinking sun. The sun dance ended in a leaden hail. The brooks have all forgotten how to run. I found a feather but I lost the bird. I sent out fifty scouts and they returned with word that there would never be…
Red houses, white houses, drawing our curtains against the spectacle of each other washing dishes and trimming the dog’s nails. Now and then we exchange news. Life’s gotten harder, easier, nobody this week has tied a noose in the master bedroom, or watched his bed flame on the lawn. Nobody in a black auto pulls…
Pressed between print, haunting gutters, we traded closeness for dialogue and plot, dropped concordantly to sleep not long before dawn, hardbacks propped on our chests like tents on a plain in Cooper. Wingless, piscatorial, we dined on starches and molds, slid into cracks, crevices, bathtubs on occasion. Troubled to escape their slick, enameled palisades, we…
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