If you’re anything like me, then maybe you’ll be caught off guard when my time comes, and you’ll forget to escape my body, thinking, Well, maybe I oughta stay with him and see if he comes around. And by then it could be too late—you trapped within my useless remains like a dolt. I...
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Up at the cabin, Bill O’Reilly demonstrates how to spread gravel. Up at the cabin, a rainbow trout learns to swallow young women fishing from the bank. Up at the cabin, thunder storms flood our shoes if left on the steps. Up at the cabin, an ornithologist wearing khaki pants and shirt grows eagle...
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Approaching the Tappan Zee Bridge I see a green highway sign reading “Life is Worth Living” with a phone number below. I ask my husband, “Do you think a lot of people jump off the bridge attempting suicide?” At first he says, “Probably,” which leads to, “I don’t know; it’s not that high above...
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I. Our pastor talks about cherubim on Easter Sunday. Cherubim, you say, like little angel babies, like cupid with his arrows, like paintings by Michaelangelo. When we look it up, we find out that cherubim guard the gates of Eden, protecting paradise from you and me. II. The condom breaks. Thin latex stretches, shatters...
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when you are gone and what you recall about where you’ve been and who you’re with will close down from the full size of your sight to a small circle pushed by a pin and for one brief second before it changes in the light still yellowing through a single hole every last thing...
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The hand materialized out of the darkness as if floating…connected to nothing. It clamped down over her lips, the sound of her scream engulfed between the crevasses of his fingerprints. The taste of pennies filled her mouth. She reached behind her head, flailing her arms trying to escape his grasp. The hand shoved her...
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We sit on the tablecloth, junebug green with splotches of white daisies or wildflowers or tulips, indistinguishable in the dark of the icebox night, the sky injected with dim clouds in the spaces where stars should be. There are no more seats at the picnic tables that speck the side yard of the coffee...
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Now that you’re gone, I sleep in the middle of the bed, my head swallowed by the crease where the pillows meet. I eat the whole dessert, or none at all, ignore the buy-one-get-one-free deal on Publix ice cream when I go to pick up dinner for one. Now that you’re gone, I use...
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We fall asleep with our foreheads pressed together, the way our palms should be. Maybe this is how we’re so much the same, how our thoughts twine and twist, loop together like the shoelaces I fumbled with when I was six years old. Each time our tongues are wrapped I wonder why my words...
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for June You start in the usual way, centered, earth spinning on the wheel. You have to consider volume, the space required to contain or embrace—as you so often have— the beloved body, reduced in the kiln, vitrifying memory and affection in the glaze, hardening the walls your hands draw up from clay as...
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in Kerry Cannon’s basement, his cut-up-glow-paper walls surrounding us with so many smug stars and planets, while the Friends of Distinction slow-sung “Going in Circles” to emphasize the irony: I a freshman at Cathedral Prep in a dark room recognizing no priesthood beyond what I might sanctify by pressing Sylvia’s present willingness tight through...
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I called back my thanks, still focused on the fish I had pulled out by putting my hand inside its mouth, where what passes for teeth in trout conspired with my pink and silver treble-hooked spoon to complicate my rushing joy for one that had not gotten away. In my haste to show my...
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Blame that last flash and clap, tumultuous, explosive, as if the skies themselves feared what he did not yet see: the yellowed eyes, the protruding brow, green skin stretched like rough canvas over a hasty marriage of joint and bone. When that light rent the night’s dark skirts the stars themselves hid from the...
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I throw away the slacks of solitude socks of solitude leggings bloomers crinoline chemise lace bib buckram ruff jerkin over-blouse of solitude sash cummerbund foulard raincoat great-coat cape poncho parka shawl shawl top hat tiara beret fedora cloche of solitude girdle garters corset half-slip pajama robe kimono night-gown wrapper slipper sandal Stop I’ll keep...
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I want to dance like her on the crowded floor I want to writhe in music guiltless as a child I want eternal blood circulating like a halo I want to dance like a rising sun in Death Valley. I do not want to live like a shadow in my life I refuse to...
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The sun is going down—disappearing like me. I, holding on to the light, the last capture of my sight. Soon my blood will spurt like a burst pipe over the warm summer field. The greedy animal will satisfy his thirst. Go ahead, eat me, eat all of me. Do not tranquilize me. Do not...
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1. Someone has to drive What would I do without students, their cans of Jolt and indiscernible needs, their wept-on poems and muddled brilliance? Twitching with meth, slumped in sweatshirts, numb from grandmothers’ slow deaths and boyfriends’ quick suicides, they crash into college like cars into phone poles. With one of my hands, I...
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When I open a book I am always in a position to find something—information, a thrill, a moral insight, a happy turn of words—but to find an actual something in a book, an object I wasn’t looking for, stirs up an awareness, often an uncanny one, that somebody was there before me. An unexpected...
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I got called in to a little dark room, windowless. Mrs. Lopez showed me a picture book. Khang, I say. No, river, she says. Liver, I say. Not liver, it’s river, she says. That’s what I said, river, river, river, khang— It’s a khang! She shook her head. Look at my mouth, she says,...
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The freshly painted green gate doors swing out. The slow drive up the windy hill. Eternity. Where the hell am I. Top. A middle-aged man is standing in front of what seems to be the office. Mom pops open the trunk so I can get my duffel bag. My lack of upper body strength...
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