Li Po, this is your invite to the Prop Stop, a honky-tonk unreachable except by boat where we’d tether to a buoy and then, barefoot or in flip-flops, tightrope across a rug of skiffs, two weekenders not looking for trouble but ready to battle any slurs the hicks unleash. I keep samurai toothpicks and wine…
Already, his abdomen was sculpted, and already the thin trail descending from beneath his belly button. Even now it is difficult to explain it. I was, after all, only 7; I didn’t even know what Turkish meant. In the dead of winter, which only meant certain flowers had ceased blooming on the island, we had…
Against an empty sky, the elm is feathered with gold like some apparent wing. On the dark avenue, people pass, lifting their collars. Through the lit windows, empty stairwells and still pianos. Sparrows drive their hearts into grass. The moon pulls aside its curtain as if someone is peering there. Solitude could not find a…
We were young again. Sex as an act of reverence was not yet even imaginable. There was no such thing . . . The point was to push eventually past mere distraction, to achieve an effacement entirely of what, inside us, we couldn’t bear looking long at, no, not a moment longer, what was pleasure…
Three months after my brother’s death, I saw Uncle Vanya in New York. Near the end of the play, Vanya says he’s forty-seven years old. I’d forgotten that, and the line caught me off-guard. Forty-seven was my brother’s age when he killed himself. I wondered if there was something about being forty-seven—the very beginning of…
Around that time, the city grew quiet. You said Don’t hurt me and I said If I was going to hurt you I’d have done it already. We passed a dying store with gem-like windows. A door that banged in the wind. You said Let me go. As in a film of the apocalypse, a…
New York City, August 13, 2003 All this is not unusual in DR or Iraq. The city’s extension cord shorts. Afternoon, offices evacuate. The focus is on feet, some people walking through boroughs for the first time. We stare at our feet, elbow to elbow eyeing packed buses. Some hitch rides on the back of…
rolled through the city. Whoever has an answer won’t last. Traffic muscles through. Whole families lazing on steps eating grapes. “No I’m not,” says the youngest to her canary. “You grew into your legs, Tall One, didn’t you.” Then no one. Loosed papers flatten the fences. Bits of glass rest there and burn. This part…
The first time she could remember hearing thunder she’d been sitting on her grandma’s lap in the formal parlor of the big old house where she was visiting. She flinched and shuddered. “What’s that, Grandma?” she’d asked. “That is the voice of God,” the old woman said, and then they heard it again rolling out…
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