—And yet this great wink of eternity October was what it had already become when I entered the walled graveyard, the air golden and remote in the last minutes before evening. A bedstand and springs made the gate, pulled aside, and the stones faced the sunset, all those not overturned, flung …
How charitable to call it fruit, when almost nothing inside it can be eaten. Just the gelatin that thinly rinds the unpalatable seed. The rest of it all pith, all bitter, hardly a meal, even for a thin girl. But enough, at least in the myth, to be what ties Persephone half the year to…
The world will be no different if the twin sisters Disputing now in the linen aisle of Kaufman’s Resolve their difference about table napkins, Whether the color chosen by one is violet Or lavender or washed-out purple. No different, But that’s no reason to deem the talk insignificant. It’s important for people to make distinctions,…
They left her alone; it was what she wanted. The bay waters had not been so secret for a long while, their great labor quiet. She rowed over the calm of the ebb to an island of birds—heron, cormorant, egret waiting in the tall mangroves, placid and self-contained, as if she alone were…
While you suffered I measured flour for a birthday cake, the bleached grinding of wheat flowing from a tin scoop like water, like cold air I split walking in winter woods, snow a long white apron flung against the fissured maples, the smooth trunks of birches. While you wept I sang, the candles flared to…
Chelsea, Massachusetts “Mrs. López refuses to pay rent, and we want her out,” the landlord’s lawyer said, tugging at his law school ring. The judge called for an interpreter, but all the interpreters were gone, trafficking in Spanish at the criminal session on the second floor. A volunteer stood up in the gallery. Mrs….
i. Do they hate each other, I wonder, she who will live on and he who is dying? I fill their bird feeder with safflower. Each dip of the orange pitcher scatters seed from its lip to the earth, in ecstasy. An arc. A small rain falls down. Bruised light a nacre over everything. My…
Two kinds of sand. One heavy, gritty, That falters moodily under your toes, like custard; The other, shiny weedy ribs, and further, Out of sight, the standstill sea. You tramp along In sunbonnet and spade, summer’s regalia. You choose a gray snake’s nest, slice into it, And yes, there are lugworms, and you…
1 Honey’s sweetness thins in steaming tea; a drop of honey thickens to amber on the pantry counter. Oh, the sweetening dank, the dark I inhale: come on the sheets on which my lover naps. A rolled-up paper uncoils in a whisper: come is a rose is a star is a monster….
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