I could have sworn this was a cave with thin gray branches at the opening, a perfect ellipse. No one’s home but home. No whistle over the opening. A man empties his lungs entirely, so he can sing, so we can sing. He looks down at the ground. I look at the cave and then […]
It’s disturbing to recall the child’s analogy of adult desire: how you were certain to be in parlor view of your grandmother’s cuckoo clock moments before the hour. That’s the suggestive silence of all the engines at rest, every toggle switch in the off position, the warehouse of robotic arms recumbent. If you’ve a mind […]
Whatever inspired that first live cell to pull a little line down the center and so become, as two, both and neither, it must have known what a child knows when he looks up at a house on fire, until, ascending, the night is day again. When I was his age, I put my ear […]
He only likes to build it. He doesn’t live Where he swims, where the city has pieces, He means to mend them, to tear the city Pieces where it can be mended. Here At my desk, I engage in a crisis among us. What I’m doing is with my development. What I’m doing these days […]
It happened so quickly I couldn’t remember my other life, the life of the well, that ordinary wake-up-in-the-morning-have-a-cup-of-coffee-and-get-on-with-it self. One day I had a routine: I’d write for an hour each morning at the kitchen table, go to work at nine, come home at six, fix dinner with David, and then read or write until […]
Listen to our podcast of this story here. Midmorning in mid-October, in the middle of the campus, Chandra stopped in the center of the crisscrossing sidewalks. She pulled the phone from her handbag and pretended to be texting someone; she smiled down at the screen as if someone had texted her back. She felt […]
Listen to our podcast of this poem here. Friends, countrymen, one of these men is lying and though we care for one another, we’ll never agree about which one it is. The smile of lying and the smile of catching another in a lie are identical smiles. Friends, countrymen. Let us turn to the […]
Around a bend, and light that erases such failure. As a kid, in a desert full of fragile soils and beauty buckled and spired, full of hoodoo-tent-rock, space that could have drowned us. And the lakes cast pink, dowsing for the ley lines in blueberry bush and frost dune and there’s something I want to […]
Growth of trees is measured against the red shed, loud edifice now clear of old hay and dung, though still cluttered with rolls of fencing wire extracted and collated from the block, and tools for keeping the grass down, and paraphernalia for running the pump, and the air pump itself, its hoses reaching out under […]
I peer into the towel casket, reach unfurred hand to rusted red crown, down the unknotted spine I imagine being crushed by the crescendo car wheeling murder towards it. I lift the eyes, now my eyes, I don’t want, look the spine in its bruised and knuckly face. Spine, I ask, whatever species in you […]