* A girl with Chanel earrings asks me a question about Emerson. * Test: the eraser ends of their pencils dance like little dervishes. * The autistic kid finds God in the right angles of the hall’s lockers. * A martyred French fry: foot-flattened and filthy on the lunchroom floor. * … Read more
they found her small body wired into the heart of the church, small LEDs sprouting through her skin blooming like tiny red flowers too far deep for sunlight to reach. she was sheared clean through to bone by claws big enough to belong to the God hanging over the spot her mangled body lay. … Read more
where are we now? one man asked we shone our flashlights around the cave saw only stone, tall ceilings, dark passages darting off in every direction. The map showed us which random tributary would take us back to sunlight, although it was hard to believe that we were somewhere on that flat piece of paper, … Read more
You did not sleep last night. At least that you can recall. At about one or two in the afternoon, you wake and go to your old Corona to feed it its lunch of ribbon and paper. You think of it as a child—always hungry, always dark, and with a mouth of white teeth. You … Read more
When you were ten you caught a fish and showed your parents that pink flesh. They whooped loud, mercury eyes! Silver guts! That day all guzzled more than enough. and that night, you grasped a new way to sit that made the family round and perfect. All your thoughts from that day on were mother, … Read more
I have sought them at the close of day. In the basement, living room, and the foyer— They’re gone. So is the house, sold to monks who pray For suffering’s cessation and stolid abstinence From attachments. But I loved them, my parents Who let me abide and gave me a chance To ride on their … Read more
—You are still definitely looking for his approval. Your dad’s I mean, I said. —Nah. —You are. You sat down at your parents’ kitchen table and told your dad you’d bought that record on vinyl. On vinyl. That’s because you care. I sat back in the chair and waited. He would come up with some … Read more
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 hope … Read more
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 talons … Read more
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 the … Read more
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 statistics: … Read more
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 will … Read more
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 down … Read more
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 shop. … Read more
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 your … Read more
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 don’t … Read more
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 they … Read more
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 me, … Read more
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 son, … Read more
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 monstrosity … Read more
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 the … Read more
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 numb … Read more
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 close … Read more
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 grade … Read more
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 channel … Read more
