Summers meant peeling: peaches, pears, July, all carved up. August was a tomato dropped in boiling water, my skin coming right off. And peas, Lord, after shelling all summer, if I never saw those green fingers again it would be too soon. We’d also make wine, gather up those peach scraps, put them in jars…
Two heaps of clothes by an old stump, and Nicholas neck-deep in that water too cold for our own good. Shimmering when he said he wasn’t sure but thought maybe it was a man he wanted, though I was what he had under his hands in that blue current. Blue of the nearly and almost….
Yesterday I fell into a ditch trying to reach across to the fattest prizes—slipped, my rump hitting the prickly ground so hard I thought of sudden love. The ripest ones will drop into your hand at a brush of the branch. I can spot them now, the ones so black they’re almost blue, crow-colored. That…
A man in the south of France flaps his elbows and dances with a female crane, who is the last of the Black-tails. He hoots and coos, and she lowers her long delicate neck. Yesterday the man had sunned and swum amid a swarm of nude swimmers in the Riviera’s cloudy waters, so that now…
When the first radio wave music escaped Earth’s ionosphere, it literally did become eternal. Music, in this century, has been converted from sound into the clarity of pure light. Radio has superseded the constraints of space. —Leonard Shlain, Art & Physics Imagine Vivaldi suddenly falling on the ears of a woman somewhere beyond Alpha Centauri,…
Somebody almost walked off with all my stuff —Ntozake Shange at best you can say your judgment was tainted by movies and old expectations Paris equals passion n’est pas? so why not ride the subway just this one night despite all the echoes of caution dancin :…
When the giant panda views another of her species through a window, in a mirror, does she feel a little less lonely? I smile when I see another couple like us, though of course they aren’t like us, except for the contrast between white skin, and black. The year I turned twelve the way we…
When the air is thin with frost I blow rings of ice smoke as I did when I was young and imagined myself grown and never answering to anyone. From smoke rings to pots that became helmets and tanks, I play-acted a world where color held no name and eyes were tears holding light. Without…
So much for the solid- gold musical taste of the age, upbeat, down and out, love- sick groans bawling from the suitcase-sized boom box riding the shoulder of a cholo in shades, webbed hairnet, flannel shirt buttoned to the neck in midsummer, pimp- strut rocking by on tip- toe past pairs of squat, unisex…
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