At thirty-nine each apple reminds me of some other. The memory lives in objects: fallen from trees or baked like pie. I kiss my daughter and remember my own face kissed. All Broadway music is from a play I saw with my father when his eyes were fine. Certain words or smells evoke the faces…
after Horace Odes I.11 However candid, wise, courageous, and charming the neurologist, it was surely a mistake for her to say that thirty years might stretch ahead of me living with who I lived with. And yet I had asked her, silly as Leuconoe. Scire nefas! Besides, how could she tell quem mihi finem…
The turning of the pages of a magazine in the middle of a morning sends waiting-room echoes through the quiet house, echoes that are making us old. The routines that hold us closer to them and this sense that steady notice is being taken of us somewhere now, this is making us old and the…
Rather, it is in the shorter history of America, not England, not Italy, that we find ourselves in the perfect middle of a rainy summer afternoon inside a 1930s shingled boathouse long since beached on a low hill out of water’s reach, and plumbed and electrified for habitation. No effort has been made to hide…
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…
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