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…
She could only remember that leather thing of skin flapped over the sunken chest, the way the sheet cut him off at the waist and chin, effacing the place where the rest of the delinquent body hid. She could only remember the fact of ribs sprawled flat as the arms of starfish floating drugged on…
1. I want to explain about the broken finger. It is all appetite. Voracious, exuberant, world devouring appetite. When I was five they found me at dawn beside the piano playing chords and weeping. Even when they boxed my ears for putting a thumb on a black key it did not diminish my appetite. I…
On this pavement I have fallen without grace, and I am looking into the eyes of a handsome blue stranger, who will not let me rise. He says an ambulance is coming. I may have broken a bone. But he is lying, and he knows that I can rise if I desire. This lady claims…
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