Chéri, do you remember the time we tried to move into that house on 69th & Main, but there were people already living there? And one of them was me? Lord, how we laughed. We’d struck a deal on that place, or thought we had, but at the last minute there they were, …
On shadow-bellering nights, headlights over the hill are like sunrise. I trace scars, wonder how the other driver caught theirs. I used to think I could make a home in any light, but if the world was ending, I’d be stretched out toward a lantern on the dining room table inside a farmhouse. …
When the shape of a man is cut from blue construction paper is the paper form more human or the void left behind? Tracing the interior of the head—meaning the void’s head—tells us much of the cut; it’s smooth, & painless, & if they weren’t blue nobody would see the sparse fibrous strands …
Our cousin plays the clarinet. He plays after supper in Újvidék. He plays in Hungary, in Ugoslavia, in Novi Sad, Serbia, all at once and in one spot. He plays in an upper room. The shadow of a ceiling fan passes over him like a wing. He plays the clarinet. He plays klezmer, …
Because you’ve read Camus, you chuckle, conclude at this late age that, yes, Sisyphus is happy. You get up, brush off the dust of grass— scale the mound.
Out of the snake pit, into the spider’s web. This must be the way dinosaurs felt, feet heavy as planets, trapped at LaBrea Tar Pits. Swimming though a pool of orange Jell-O, running the fifty-yard dash on a soft, chewed bubble-gum track. Flat tire, broken bones, quicksand. Dizzy from height, speed, lack of …
for Ethan It’s as if I was just born, having not known or sitting in a white painted room, quiet as a baby on his back looking with new walls, new streets, new skin and dark eyes face up at the curve of the lines of a black ceiling grate in a …