FICTION.
“Quiet, now,” she told us. “It’s like Tinker Bell.”/ “What’s like Tinker Bell?” Gnome asked. It was a stupid question, but we forgave him because his eyes were the color of a sandstorm, and he sat still as an injured bird./ “If you don’t believe, it won’t come true.” Aunt Halina was patient with these types of questions. She wasn”t really our aunt. She smelled like melted butter, and she had a scar on her chest that she wouldn’t let us see. She started the story again. (...)
POETRY.
Echoes uncurl down this canyon/ like patient honey rolling. Rocks repeat/ everything I say. A tree falls/ as many times as I can hear it. (...)
The wide range converges./ The moon dilutes itself on the plate.// A blue shape, a coat of sorts, wears itself out. (...)
POETRY.
The girls hold each other up. / Cameras blacken and turn the fire / engines quiet. An ambulance stalls. (...)
It’s not / the kiss of coffee / or the glancing touch of feathered down, or first sunlight shared / like sections of the newspaper. (...)
FICTION.
He shouldn’t have worn sneakers. That was a mistake. A shower would have helped, too. Why could he never remember that skipping a shower didn’t lend him a feeling of rebelliousness, as his mirror would like to have him think, but only made him feel slimy, insecure? Conner stopped to retie his shoelace in front of the library. The library was closed now, as were the dining halls, the student center, and the university bookstore; a week ago Conner had sold back his books for Professor Palma’s course, Ancient Rome. Forty-one dollars and ninety-three cents. Conner felt guilty for selling these, and so had kept The Twelve Caesars by way of apology. He’d imagined Professor Palma watching him from a hidden window, nodding. (...)
POETRY.
The snow held your shape like bedding, / the shadow of your hand over your head ruined / by the feet of the men who found and carried you. (...)
She’s driving her bed through an illustrated town, / and the road snaps off like a pencil: (...)
Add to me a mechanical voice, the smell / of the heavens because they smell of the earth, / and what would hydrogen-react with past forms of us // falling. (...)
FICTION.
Gordon reached across the jumble of plates for the bottle of raki. He’d lost track of the conversation around him. The taverna sat high on a hill, its balcony overlooking the Sea of Marmara, but even at a height the smell of murky water and dead fish reached his nostrils. (...)
POETRY.
There is a steep hill and clover / thick as lamb’s ear, as leather bellows / splayed to rouse fire embers. (...)
The belly. // The belly / of the boy. // The glowing white / and gray ultrasound / of the head, / and the legs, / and the belly / of the shimmering / sea-horse-sized / boy. (...)
After the biopsy, / after the bone scan, / after the consult and the crying, (...)
POETRY.
Not bluebirds nesting in a wooden box / nailed to your picket fence. (...)
Night arrives with a handful of hard stars / to throw in the deeps of the blueblack vault. (...)
Anger can erupt like a lawn mower pieced together / Suddenly exploding / Yellow jackets (...)
I want to be the people / in the architect’s model / faceless shapely always / striding beside the shiny / walls girders windows halls (...)
Our bodies cast a shadow of one / Body under a black-bulb pulse / In your mother’s basement. Light, even (...)
Your eyes hold enough lies / Day-to-day walking through the market, / A woman walking freely without / The sleight of hand of my skin, this peccadillo. (...)
I’ve been left alone on my third wedding anniversary / until you return to my stoop with your payload, (...)
FICTION.
Little Joe hit Buster from behind with a three-foot section of galvanized steel, hit him so hard the single flat note of it echoed through the welding shop like a bell. The whole shop stopped working and watched Buster drop to his knees. (...)
In 1950, I remember nothing more than hating my piano lessons. My mother paid Mrs. Bacyznsky, a fellow Ukrainian immigrant, a quarter for a week’s worth. Mrs. Baczynsky lived seven blocks away, and I not only had to walk there for lessons, but to practice, since we did not own a piano. Every day, my friends Mario and Dale from P.S. 8 would interrupt their game of stickball with a sympathetic wave: There but for the grace of God go I. (...)
So the river’s down, the sun’s starting to blur, and I’m out on my stoop working a late cup of coffee and watching a bunch of the neighbor kids play Jaguars in the mud below. They bare their fangs and brandish their claws and run in and out through the posts that hold up the houses in our part of Belén. The bigger kids hunt down the smaller ones, pin them to the ground and pretend to rip out their jugulars. (...)
POETRY.
From this distance he can see that the man / is not Jack Gilbert. And he is not yet himself. (...)
The rafters are falling, pins in the hair, a counted orbit. / How is it the coin, revolutionary smile, creeps in, swallows up? (...)
And so Pinocchio the wooden puppet / became living flesh, / as he wished. (...)
There came a year the potatoes in Eske’s Field / grew twisted in the ground, like men buried alive, / and the sky at night bore a new white scar / low over the north hills, pointing down. (...)
When she leaves you, move here / to Memphis, where everything / drains from east and west down / to one point, where everything / is still unsteady (...)
Today the ants are busy / beside my front steps, weaving / in and out of the hill they’re building. (...)
Before the war, they were happy, he said, / quoting our textbook. (This was senior-year // history class.) The slaves were / clothed, fed, and better-off under a master’s care. (...)
FICTION.
The men in my family gather at Oak Hall this morning to make birds. They sit in the dining room at an antique cherry oak table and carefully fold their paper cranes. My father and his three brothers fold tiny pieces of paper, squares of yellows and pinks and whites and blues and greens so thin that light passes through them, as if they aren’t there at all. (...)
POETRY.
In purity you have removed everything / from your room: like a canyon holds a bridge / in its arms your body stretches / across morning. (...)
I could almost hear the pail squeaking / in his hand as he walked up the hill / toward a house, maybe his own house. (...)
If I fell in love with a meadow cricket / because she was sad, because of her enormous dark eyes, / we’d disappoint my family and scandalize (...)
Because your books won’t make / a sufficiently beautiful sense, / your neighbor has walked through her house (...)
Everything here measures: weight, effort, sin— / and everything costs in this seclusion (...)
Another consequence of the storm: / our neighbors lost two Bradford pears, // trees that often survive just seven years / (life of a marriage these days was the joke), (...)
He does things like cry / and I rush to him / then he goes like a small human whale to a room / where he can be alone— (...)
At the back of the house in Lincolnton / is the room where I was ill, / where my bed overlooked the autumn yard / with a low impermanent wall of leaves— (...)
We kept waiting by the pond, in the afternoon. The blades of grass / leading to the round liquid were bright. You could see our travel, (...)
He told us the story just last week—explained how / the fluid bleeding through the walls of those graves / he dug wasn’t water. His penultimate metaphor, (...)
FICTION.
The enormous foot of an elephant served as an umbrella stand for the shop’s clients. When Anna returned to it, after purchasing her boss’s anniversary gift for his wife, her umbrella had vanished. Two ordinary contraptions remained, flimsy things made of vinyl and plastic. No one could have mistaken her umbrella, with its carved handpiece and long, wooden shaft, for the collapsible pieces aban-doned in the elephant foot. Someone had filched it and it was gone—plundered for the February rain. Anna would never see it again. (...)
My mind so advanced at nine... was the rhyme in my head that morning as I walked down the street outside our brownstone. I used to geese hoes for Easter clothes—Memphis Bleek held real estate in my mind that morning, still wet from the shower, passing the Rasta, Trees? Trees? And a line of people spilling out of the bodega because the lotto just reached 25 mil. Just off the neighborhood’s main strip of hustle, my street was a residential community of three-story Brooklyn brownstones, most with short gates, huge, old-fashioned doorways, and well-kept stairwells with potted plants or flowers. Every three of four houses were abandoned or just shy of it, a reminder of the street’s crack-house-ridden past. (...)
POETRY.
Every night a man walks by my house and calls my name. If this were / a movie, his voice would sound like Spanish guitar and blue eyes and in // an hour and a half we would have a big wedding. But it’s only real life, (...)
In the slow unraveling of a marriage, / one can feel the draft at odd moments, (...)
Dove il gabbinetti? she asks. / And we know she’ll be lost forever / between this scene and the next, the sheet (...)
Once held a pile / of biscuits. Since then sits / still in the corner, a tabby / watching marbles roll / and sound across the floor. (...)
On Wednesday, they pulled a woman, / once-woman, out of the lake— / drowned who-knows-when / and turned into soap. (...)
FICTION.
Early one morning, a young woman entered a dusty train station and watched hours of arrivals and departures register and vanish from the reader board, like the noisy blinking of a hundred square black eyes. With a large bag on her shoulder, she boarded a westbound train from one of its platforms, staring at the tracks beneath the car for a moment before she pulled her weight up the first long step. She seated herself in the nearest empty car. As the train whistle blew a final warning, she checked her passport, as she did every time she left a city. She then looked at the sign along the brick wall opposite the corridor windows. It announced a word more like Prague than any other she had encountered. (...)
Me. Jack. Standing in the breakdown lane, hands in pockets, like a couple of morons out in the cold. We didn’t even have gloves. One car had passed us, one car in the last twenty minutes, an old Plymouth Valiant, and when we waved it down we saw an old man looking straight ahead so intently that we knew he’d never stop. He saw us, but he didn’t want to see us. Which was precisely why we’d driven this road in the first place, going north. We’d gone to see someone who didn’t want to see us. Now we were coming back. And we were stuck. (...)
POETRY.
We’ve witnessed the anatomical spectacle: / the frog’s wired leg both cathode / and electrode; the cadaver a vehicle / for current; scent of ozone; muscle splayed. (...)
It happened on a normal day: you slipped on the icy sidewalk / or in the bathtub, maybe roller-skating with your son. You’ve fallen / and banged your leg, hard, and later that night, alone in your room, / you watch it form: the barest hint of lavender deep beneath your skin. (...)
Tell me again about that dream where, / In my lace skirt, I’m stealing your blueberries / Faster than you pick them. (...)
Tonight’s 11:58 freight train, boxcar / horizon, is more than a familiar melody (...)
POETRY.
Winter is hogging the canvas tonight. / The cat and I lie curved at the edge / of the world, / well on our way to becoming a statistic. (...)
When Burt paid me, he licked the brown envelope / like a sad dog lapping at a stranger’s cheek. (...)
As if my heart has been pulled / from my body. Bewildered. // My senses brimming with indecision’s / thick black smoke. Whatever choice remains // means someone undeserving of it / must suffer the consequences. (...)
Late night July / in Minnesota, with John / asleep on the glassed-in porch, // I listen (quietly) / to Bob Dylan on a cassette / you made from an album // I got rid of soon after / you died. (...)
FICTION.
Two days ago she had picked up the phone, shaking with fear, only to listen to the distant voice of the official from the Ministry of Agriculture and Farming telling her that, yes, their animals, their farm, their life was now condemned. (...)
It is low and sad and frightening, a dark sound rising from a dark place—the deepest corner of lung, nested there like a secret. You’ll hear it in the evenings, when the sky’s gone pink and shadows start to melt together. If your back is turned to the forest from which it pours, you’ll turn around quick and find strength in the tight hand-shake of the walnut stock of your .338 WinMag. Your breathing gets desperate. You aim at everything, push your gun forward like it was the mute button. The sound is gigantic, a low-throated moan, faraway, copied by another, closer by, then another, then another. The sound—it renders you lonely, the loneliest man in the whole world. This is the language of elk. (...)
Jack could taste the diesel fumes coming into his dive mask and he reminded himself, again, to beat the crap out of that bubba J.C. when he went up. J.C. had started the pump up on top of the tower and hadn’t checked the direction of the wind, so the diesel fumes were getting blown right into the air intake and into Jack’s hat. Not a big deal in a forty foot water tower but that dumb hick would do exactly the same thing offshore and probably kill somebody. (...)
POETRY.
I like the way mutiny rebels against sense / By sounding as elegant as a chorus // Of bodies jumping ship, though of course, / They leap by sword. (...)
And just like that it hits you— / All the promises you’ve dodged / Like bicycles on a sidewalk / By stepping out into traffic, // The friends you’ve hugged to stick / Kick-me signs to their backs, // The lies you’ve pirated because you thought / That’s exactly what / A stranger wants to hear (...)
All I want all day is morning with its nightgown eyelets / and its places for sleep like your long, slender arms, / your neck, your hair. (...)
It is hard for him to remember the string / of women. None of them mother. None of them / childhood. Not names, just different colors of lipstick, / lasting only until the mouths were worn / back to their natural shades. Their unmentionables / they left behind from the shove out the door. (...)
Nocturne: For the Aviaries
Then the rain came, / full of a sadness I’ve never seen before, / through the cottonwoods // and along the river, / which is no longer a river / but an apparition under the sand. (...)
That was it: the rope pulling taut, his spine jerking. / Neck-burn, the end of the brilliant, breathing thing // that was his body. (...)
In the dream, I am with the Fugitive / Poets. We’re gathered for a photograph. / Behind us, the skyline of Atlanta / hidden by the photographer’s backdrop— (...)
Suppose it happened like this: / you are outside, like the woman // in this photograph nearly a century / before you, (...)
POETRY.
The mornings drag on, arriving at a quality of grayness impossible / at a more complicated hour. I am used to the rooms of the house / being empty, their quiet as fast to me as the bone-colored paint (...)
It didn’t shock me when it came—it seemed / I’d worried at the grain of it so long, / like a mollusk, hard at work against the thing (...)
At sunup we begin again, above the dam / where the river is corralled / and strains against the mesh of roots / that line the banks, / each fat from spring’s run-off. (...)
The dish, / like a moon on my neighbor’s roof, / gathers light // though it isn’t light he’s after, (...)
She tried to break what the mirror saw, / but could only sweep the sharp edges of herself away. (...)
FICTION.
Clarissa’s father worked for the Hendry County Water Management Board. She imagined him in the company van, driving across the flat Florida miles, reading meters at concrete bunker pumping stations and looking with concern at canals thick with algae, so she wasn’t surprised when she returned home and only her mother was there to greet her. (...)
Outside the Restaurant Suisse I lay in the ivy. I was flat on my back, the ivy curled around my arms and legs, bucking my chin (tickling me really). A soft vegetal bed. I smelled of shade because it smelled of shade. Of earth, of cool life among leaves, of small stones and the snails beneath them. In the ivy, it is dark and peaceful while I wait for my guests who are touring the city. They have a map (I sold it to them). My maps always lead to the Suisse. (...)
POETRY.
View this alone in the dark, and be brief. / Unwrap it from the black paper in your bedroom with the curtains closed. (...)
My train slows through a weedy crossing / where children wait, holding their bikes / at angles under their short bodies, twisting / the handles right and left. (...)
FICTION.
From the time she welcomed me at the door, it was clear Gloria knew what was going to happen, or it was clear what she thought was going to happen. There was a boldness about the woman that was both scary and thrilling. (...)
POETRY.
She said: An American girlhood. I served the snacks // Not me, not me, not me, but something enemy // in aprons, spit in the oysters. (...)
The one gas station attendant / shines his pump. I love no one // right now. It’s that easy / to get by here. (...)
his momma does my hair, / in plaits not braids, and whistles / out complaints through the comb / held like a pirate’s knife in her teeth, (...)
Tonight, I buy a 12-pack just for old times’ sake / and feel, as I twist off the top and lift the bottle’s lip to mine, / a tiny man who must be a part of myself (...)
FICTION.
JUNE 5, INTERSTATE 44, MISSOURI. We’ve been on the road for two days, heading west. The miles are expanding and lengthening our bones. The sky grows bigger, widens, turns into something else, a place to lose ourselves, azure blue and never-ending, space without end. We drive with the windows rolled down. Hot air blows on our eyes and skin. (...)
The daughter is leaving home, and the time has come for advice, so the mother tells the story of how she once fought off a high-school state-champion wrestler in the backseat of his Chevy by holding the blade of her ice skate to his temple. (...)
I am reading I, The Jury in the backseat of Stan’s Pontiac, I am scrunched down low in the seat so that even when I lift my eyes from the page I cannot see out the window. All this to say that my mother can force me on this so-called family vacation but she can’t make me look at scenery. She cannot make me enjoy myself. (...)
© 2008 University of North Carolina Greensboro