She was my Sunday school teacher when I was just seven and eight. He was the newly hired pastor, an albino, alarming sight with his transparent eyelashes and mouse-pink skin that looked like it might hurt whenever she caressed his arm. Since Eva was her name, to my child’s mind it made great…
Sprawled on the back of a flatbed truck we cradled hoes, our minds parceling rows of cotton to be chopped by noon. Dawn stuck in the air. Blackbirds rang the willows. Ahead, a horse trailer stretched across the road. Braced by youth and lengths of summer breeze we didn’t give a damn. We’d be…
“Si la uva está hecha de vino, quizá nosotros somos las palabras que cuentan lo que somos.” —Eduardo Galeano, El libro de los abrazos for Jane Miller It’s the mind that marshals everything into neat sequence in retrospect—subject, verb, predicate—fooling us into believing words don’t dig their tangled roots in us. But rooting around we…
When, how far back? When I played in a formal park, Grandmother watching from a bench, the chalky whiteness of the gravel glistening in the sun wiping away all that passed before me, indistinct summonings in the blaze, by contrast the deep shade from trees so dark I ran out from there fast as I…
It was only the marvelous gravity of your attention, That weighed me down, that made me seem self-delighted, Sunk like the moon in a mandarin’s cup of reflections, But truly I was suggestible as the morning. When you laced wings on your shoulders, birds rippled over My smile; when you hunted and crimsoned Into a…
Chrome made echoes of the room. He closed the door. It closed again, in accidental mirrors, warping On the cylinders for cotton, Gauze, and was comical, not comical. He closed the door, and let me watch him with his hands. I watched him wash his impressive hands In his office. Did I…
In memoriam: Irving Howe Hearing the news, we headed for this garden, a children’s picture book, a black-and-white movie turned to color for the Oz scenes. We’d planned to take him here. In this arbor, crabapple trees enclose us like a vault, their branches splayed like nerve ends over us. It is before…
These are the reminiscent lettuces, And girls with pockets full of teeth Will disappear in them, in fields of watered lettuce. They sing when no one watches them in lettuce. “Love what no one else would love. No one Else would do it.” They dot the far rows of lettuce, Scavengers, enamored of the lettuces:…
When I was white I came and went, a cycle of blood and moon and tide, hid nothing of gun-shape inside me, debated evil with no one. I said: Bring me something handsome to eat and they did, that steak butter, you could spread it on bread. I said: Bring me taxis. They…
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