Five Photographs
Two Poems: Hardboiled; Alone Outside the Glass House
Hardboiled The eggshell shatters, exposing the smooth, white belly,its pieces still clinging to the glistening skin.Standing at the sink, I scrape the shell with my nails,but the body comes, too. Soon, the egg’s yellow heartis under my fingers, the meal I imagined now broken carrion. You know what the egg needs—what time, what temperature,which pressure…
Read MoreWater Molecules and Asphalt
We got caught up in the fog. Chained to our car seats, I wanted to take the long way but I still didn’t know the roads of this city well enough to fool you like that. You were born here and knew that there in fact was a fog season and this wasn’t just some…
Read MoreWhat Good Editors Do and How To Find One
“Just get it down on paper, and then we will see what to do with it,” said Maxwell Perkins to his authors, who included Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and F. Scott Fitzgerald, for starters. Perkins is the editor who convinced those in charge at Scribner that The Great Gatsby was a masterpiece, and then he…
Read MoreFive Paintings
Two Poems: Comparing apples; Travel
Comparing apples “They’ve put up an umbrella here,”he says, leading me to the secluded tableon the upstairs patio. Shadeis plentiful in our usual spotwithout the addition of a newumbrella. But, I ask, can we ever have too much? “Wecan in death,” he affirms. “Here,”he bends to collect my newflown napkin, surveys the tableand takes his…
Read MoreSaturday Night at the D.A.V.
The ritual of bingo is weirdly beautiful, a slowed flurry of color-coded boxes and ink-stained fingers, good luck charms, and paper bags of missed opportunity. In a flat-roofed building on the outskirts of my hometown in rural Ohio, my mother and I position ourselves in the same chairs each Saturday night. This tradition started as…
Read MoreTwo Poems: Late Walk on the Sea; Birds of the Alentejo
Late Walk on the Sea There are times when time itself seems pure and simple.Nothing but a breeze, a dune unstrung for the hair of the seathat lashes us with its whispers, its muffled screams for the late walk, the day rising out of the foam.The diminutive world of sandtakes a billion planets to hold…
Read MoreWhere Was I
Rumormonger. Six letters. Ends with p. Gossip. I pencil it into the crossword, now let the finely sharpened Ticonderoga-Dixon spin laxly in my hand. I sip my coffee. Simply, unhurriedly, I sip my coffee. There is no alarm clock, no lecture to whet, no faculty brouhaha. There is only the slow lope to the market…
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