Once, a woman’s musk on the trainconjured the pinch of my seaside youth—briny, consistent in its waterlogged blessing. I waited outmy contract of subtropical longing, now here,manifested in these splayed, commuters’ bodiespeppered with wage and heat, lapping each other daily. I bend down and boost you up, future self, older woman,hold you up to the…
Like when she takes out a 1000-pieceAbstract—a Kandinsky or mandala of Buddha’s numberless lives—she’s telling me she hasn’t lost hope yetbut it’s iffy for us. When Lois slides from the shelfone from The World’s Great Destinations series, for example,“Balloons on a Spring Night over Paris,”—actually, any placewe’ve been together—she’s wishing she had wings, or for…
It may have been one of the times we died, only to come right back. Maybe we rolled the car and were reborn in the woods without a clue. At least I hope death is like this: a town with just two restaurants. What a steady fire I make against the night. What a good…
The Nile will teem with frogs. They will come up into your palace and your bedroom and onto your bed…and into your ovens and kneading troughs.—EXODUS 8:3 When, as punishment, my father made meread the Book of Exodus, he never offeredexplanation. The lesson, perhaps, was:Fathers should speak to their sons in riddles. Another riddle is…
on the front steps ofsome young professional’sapartment in Boston. She smokesI hold my breathit is hard for both of usto breathe.Her: heavy doses of medsMe: small doses of medsmeant to make seeing herless painful, other thingsless crushing. Today it is hotshe tries to blow her cigarettesmoke away from meshe doesn’t know muchabout me anymorebut she knows I’ve…
The window is a world,the trees continents, complicated,crowding the blue and hazy shoreand that house, that house over there,my mistakes come to rest in the landscape.How did they find me,invisible, behind glass? How did theybecome so solid, so fixed and neighborly,more vigilant each day, looking outfor any errant kindness that mightpass by, and shatter the…
I buried my girlhood in the garden where nothing grows,at the bottom of the river that runs through it. I buried the hair ribbons and skirts with shorts sewn underneath,buried the blow-up pool and flamingo floaties, the plush lamb tied to a string. My girlhood, sunburned with skinned knees,leaving wet footprints on patio stones. My…
I will always remember Pythagorasbecause of you. An artistnot a scholar, carpenter, or for that matter a teacher at all—even in grade eight we understoodyou taught a2 + b2 = c2 for three straight months because it was the only math you knew and our regular teacher with his re-heated coffees and summer turtlenecksrefused to return from stress leave.At the…
For a decade, I smoked a pack a day.It wasn’t the drug I craved but pure,gleaming abandon. At sixteen, I benta car around a tree and loved the momentwhen I slipped headfirst from the webbedglass into a pool of streetlight, a puddleof my own blood. Sliding from the wreckinto a bright new realm, wet with…
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