Calling relatives during the pandemic How we are she said like plant lice on the stem of a creamy rose. She smiles into the video camera and her white hair like a halo. Pink aphids, horrifying, confused in the small 3D of the stem’s curve, she says, all of us even the president the queen a green louse can be… Read more →
You would call, quotingthe let us go, then, you and I—with lessthan ten, but eyes for watching.Two girls on a benchin a space without weather,we made up stories about othersand all the love having gone.And wasn’t it sad—how the nightstretched out before them?Later we’d walk in the wrongdirection, pet the cashmere and longfor the pair, order smoothiesand drink them down,… Read more →
I know I’m in trouble when I start dreaming of a man harvestingovaries with a melon baller, the women just sitting at the table,waiting their turn. I wake, seeing I’m in for it in the real world,maybe already in the middle of it. I haven’t been drinkingor eating those Thai noodles with the spicy peanut sauce I love.I’ve been good,… Read more →
The dust came after the elderly woman next door passed away. They carried off her belongings and then gutted her apartment. The racket of hammers and other non-musical instruments would wake me before my alarm each morning. The banging was nearly rhythmic enough to support a song, gnawing at my irritated nervous system like a tune invented for Nazi torture…. Read more →
After thirty-six hours of rain, the camper slid backward down the unpaved driveway tipping into an embankment. A Dodge Travco, red and cream tones with silver trim. One of the other cabin renters. (The resort had sold out, but during the entire week, we had never seen any of the other renters in person.) I had seen the Travco when… Read more →
Josephine was shoeless in the pasture before sunrise, the ground so cold she warmed her feet in the steam of cow manure, and when she met a man at market, eye-leveling tomatoes, she said, What lovely apples, and he married her, and she learned how to drive, practiced American sentences, birthed a daughter who covered her ears and hid from… Read more →
A gay Orthodox boy in Australia is wearing my grandmother’s diamonds, under his everyday white shirts buttoned to the neck, against his skin like the fringes’ whisper of G-d. He is the fifth of twelve children, the third son and so statistically likely to take too much pleasure in the gabardine funk of the minyan, shoulder to shoulder muttering baritone… Read more →