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Do you remember when we were standing around the park waiting for something cool to happen and that friend of ours walked up to a very orange cat and kicked it into the sky like a soccer ball, like the exact opposite of what the animal was, and how it seemed to stay in the…
Stalin’s genocide might never have happened in Pripyat, just outside Chernobyl, where soldiers told her father who asked to keep a few potatoes, Your soul will fly away and we’ll wrap your guts around the phone wires. Her family nearly killed and ate her. Then came the Germans— posing in lederhosen on the…
When he came back he wanted it all to have been the whiff of Gitanes, Place du Tertre silhouettes, carnets de billets, and the Clignancourt jazzers but in truth it was neither the city nor the heart-stopping Hovercraft ride but the long dark night of the North, the Artois, and L’Île de France, where they’d…
When he’s in the yard he’s hard to find not like when he stands in the stubble across the road brewing his voice with deeper and deeper percolations of what sounds like, “I’ll fuck anything in feathers,” stopping now and then to display his fan and perform a wobbly polka, chest heavy as he breasts…
The day’s wait over, empty-handed, I head for the truck. Some hunting days are like this, big sky showing itself off, blue down through purple to orange, salmon clouds. I’m recalling the lichen-shagged dead maple snag I stared at for an hour from my tree stand, green and gray and white starbursts, feathery at the…
Birds on a limb so far as we know sing no early bird elegies. So bird on a limb here’s no grim gift but low squawked hackle trembling antiphony to your lines about the birds not knowin who in the trees they’re singing for yet…
Dry Season at the End of the Empire Oh yes, the chariots were everywhere that summer. Running the wide streets and kicking up dust. No rain for weeks. That’s what we all said. No rain. In drawing rooms. In parlors. At the card table in The Dowager’s Palace, which was just some rooms she kept…
“poor” girl/boy, shoes shoes catch moonbeams “because” once upon the moon near/far side a shoe factory for those who’d inhabit the earth till shoemakers flourished—and the girl/boy eventually catch so many beams they fly to the moon’s side to hover and to hear this: those who’ve been crippled, those who have not been allowed to…
Has it passed quickly or slowly, the young women asked. A cockroach crawled from the salad and the waiter swept it with a piece of fresh white bread into his open hand. What was it, is it something dead, they asked. Days go slowly, years quickly is what I could have said. Szymborska says the…
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