And there was my mother, toward the end she wore only a man's pajama top and a diaper. And one morning I went to her, because it was my turn, and I leaned over her bed, which now had a rail, and I prayed, “Please, please don't let me hurt her.” And I started to…
How could I foresee what was ahead while looking back seven centuries, one rose in the crystal vase in the room where she stood before me, legs slightly apart, golden dusk all over us when she told me not to go on talking as if I were dreaming, arguing the Summa Theologica's proofs that God…
When you're in the mountains you feel the desert air. Waking to fog on a salt marsh you taste the empty boulevards of July. The earth shifts with you, one road hooks to another— a travesty of coins, shards of amphora, a trail of carnelian, things to palm at a riverbend. Words in the hand…
When you were a child, on hot, drowsy. tropical afternoons, in a secret hideout at school you peeled and sucked mamones, gnawing the sweet, fleshy pulp, remembering stories of how addicts of the fruit had been asphyxiated by mamón pits blocking their windpipes. So each mamón was an invitation to ecstasy and death (mazard berries…
“The Prime of Life” is one section of Scattering Carl, a book set at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts from late spring to mid- summer, 1978. The book has the form of a journal—prose notes and meditations, poems and poem fragments. It is a fictional journal, a made-up journal, a falsification and strenuous…
Bare grapevines hang like a waterfall before the sun— Sky the cold color of blown breath. Cats weave, wearing their Etruscan smiles, through the smudgelight and the brush. It is a January of mist and war. Bombs falling on Baghdad and the streets of Israel. The fruit of the old year eaten, and the seeds…
Maybe it was because the only time I hit a baseball it smashed the neon cross on the church across the street. Even twenty-five years later when I saw Father Harris I would wonder if he knew it was me. Maybe it was the demon-stoked rotisseries of purgatory where we would roast hundreds of years…
Something is wrong. Something is always wrong within the shush and chaos of the valves, measured drumming in the stirrups of the ear, systole and diastole, something is wrong in the sickroom of the body, & deep in the marrow the cells are born deep in the marrow the cells learn fight How clever the…
In the year 1946 a young sailor came bounding up the stairs, leapt into the kitchen, and with his arms spread out, exclaimed, “I'm home!” We stared at him silently. Mother, brothers, and sisters. But not his mother, brothers, and sisters. “Sorry,” he said, “wrong house.” I wonder what became of him? Is he still…
No products in the cart.