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I open the door to the last century and they are there, the only two men I ever loved, sitting at a table, playing cribbage, puffing on their pipes. I enter the room expecting them to rise, but they do not; one says he is preoccupied with nothing, the other does not speak at all….
Welcome to our show How Funny Can You Get. Without saying or doing anything contestants must appear so clearly we can’t help laughing. Sit down, no jokes or lettuce tuxedos tolerated. Be yourself here. Don’t smile. When you think in an objective sense you are funny enough raise the right hand. If we laugh then,…
Since no other women is like you, I wish You’d stop pretending to be representative. Nice number, for shame, tsk, tsk, Bringing your healthier sisters to witness In your case; we know, little darling, that this Difficulty Transcends sex. Style, to be sure, is neuter. Grace Does not have a space for writing in “M”…
If you were to go there alone you would find whole branches rising by themselves from the floor . . . You would see leaves and pine needles leap off into the still air, and return. There are animals in that forest without voices. Songs drifting through, like fog. Slowly you would notice the trees…
Taking yourself seriously is much more difficult even than having others take you seriously. Women aren’t trained to it. On my very first date, for example, the guy gave me five bucks to bet on my own horse and when I won I had to ask him what to do with the money. Do you…
In a thin flowery gown, out of season, draped in a bizarre gauze shawl like a new kind of insect, she sits at a table dipping chips and looking through us, thinking of nothing to pass the time. Living on the inside of time, she is waiting to come out of her own perfect body,…
I was never beautiful. I learned by heart the octaves of grief and the peculiar phrases of a man’s desires. Mine was the chord seldom struck; oh they gave me an arm to walk over the esplanade. I walked with the arm. They stood near the edge, watching, humming the ruse of the borrowed car…
I bang my spoon on the table, my iron tongue. To calm myself I try to remember the weight of a cubic foot of water, count the layers of whitewash scaling the walls. Outside is a mild apricot evening, evangelist air. Everything is far away and there are no stairs. Send me a package of…
I walk on hooked rugs; my beds are covered with patchwork. Across the road they sell corn and red beans—fresh picked, and the milk in bottles has a layer of cream an inch thick at the top. This was my father’s home I have come back to. My elderly cousin is working her latest jig-saw…
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