Quentin Carter’s, little Junie June-Bug’s running joke was “Where’s my quarter, you better give me my quarter.” Junie, 12, runt of the 6th grade, School 109, Queen’s Village— in your face, pest & joker, “Where’s my quarter, you better give me my quarter.” . . . This morning, police arrested…
I never thought we’d meet. Now here he is, swinging his arms like a speed-walker. I thought he’d look ancient—almost half a century—but in my telescope, he looks a lot like me: a few less hairs, a limp I don’t like the look of, but not an old man, certainly, though reading glasses dangle from…
The tree bore the efflorescence of October apples like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed. The wind blew in cold sweet gusts, and the burning taste of fresh snow came with the gradual dark down through the goldenrod. The blue and scarlet sky was gently losing its color, as if from…
for Angie Suss-Paul Around the corner where I lived a beautiful synagogue was burning. Around the corner where I lived. Around the corner. A beautiful synagogue. Was burning. Where I lived. Around the corner where I lived a beautiful synagogue was burning. My father came home in the evening I didn’t recognize him. He didn’t…
I talk the least of what I covet most, seldom look at what I wish to see, turn my nose away from what smells best, refuse to listen to my favorite opera, La Traviata, even when it’s sung in town for free. The Van Gogh show can’t make me walk the block to view it,…
off-season home of a circus elephant Here, the past forgets its boundaries, shines through abandoned objects: the caved tin roof of the slave quarters, wind-beaten planks and rusted knives scattered in dust and sand. Soon, the elephant will make her slow way down this path, graze among the ruins and pines; each step an…
Imagine that all you can do is glitter and you are only one small star in an expanse as wide as infinity is, and surrounded by a darkness filled up with other glitterings, fire and rock making flame into a voice. And these other small voices are all you hear in the void, their cries…
Only the colorless eye is undistracted: a lake Rubbed blue by twilight is not blue to the eye cast blue And a violet sunset cannot be refracted Violet through the violet eye. A crimson retina Won’t conceive the paint of a rigging blooded by dusk Or the stain a star makes, cutting its patina Crimson…
We raked until raking puffed our mitts with hot blisters. Then we desisted. Wind de-raked our raking then, spilled the tops of our piles, blew new-fallen bronzes across brief spans of lawn. We worked like the damned: I the Sisyphus of fall, you the Sisyphus of autumn. Rakes dropped, we drifted through discarded wrappers to…
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