When I was small likea selfish ideaI would pick pieces of his hairoff my smooth girl-bodyswollenin the dark placeswhere he had become light—from “Triptych,” Volume 63, Issue 3 (Fall 2022) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.After a long hiatus from writing after high school, I took it up . . .
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For years, Sue and I would collapse into hystericsif one of us said “Stuttgart.” We didn’t have to say“Mercedes factory” or “bedroom” or “Mom.”Just “Stuttgart” was enough to set us off,—from “Stuttgart Revisited,” Volume 63, Issue 2 (Summer 2022) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.If I skip over . . .
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I try and go back to the bottomof the placid blue lake, or maybethe storm’s calm eye. This is how I bargainfor your love in my mind, like a child.—from “Chiaroscuro after Caravaggio’s Paul,” Volume 63, Issue 2 (Summer 2022) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.In 5th grade . . .
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Fifty-nine hours before dying, Hermann Ploucquet greets the postman in the doorway. There is a letter from his mother and another from his friend, the physicist Hippolyte Fizeau, but none from Her Majesty, Queen Victoria. No doubt he pretended not to be disappointed, and I can imagine him chatting with the postman . . .
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Photo by Rick Bern “We came to think of it as our painting: two figuresEmbracing in a corrugated field, its patina of sunlightAnd stroked grasses beside the soot-stacks of factories,Their stern faces flat as prisons. Plumes of smokeUnravelling the shirt of sky.”—from “Factories at Clichy,” Volume 63, Issue 2 (Summer 2022) Tell . . .
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“When Natasha began having sex with Jimmy Walczyk, I became an ocean swimmer. With goggles and a towel I’d walk to Will Rogers Beach and, jumping in at Lifeguard Stand 18, swim a mile north to the rock jetty below the Palisades cliffs—which was danger. I wanted connectivity to that danger; I . . .
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“i thought i saw your face, your unmistakablegait on the 6 train—i’m wrong.blessings refused maybeor imagined.”—from “on Survivor’s Guilt, ending with ‘Ruff Ryders’ Anthem’ by DMX,” Volume 63, Issue 2 (Summer 2022) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.All I can remember is that I was 8 or 9 . . .
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“Denon’s mew position will turn out to be eminently strategic. When he writes to Isabelle that everyone was pleased with his appointment, he is being ironic. On the other hand, what he is quite right about is that it’s going to keep him busy constantly. An exhausting job.”—from “The Masked Baron’s Louvre” . . .
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“It was the summer of loss spanning the exact distancemy disease could reach—the degrees of longitudeand latitude, lonely numbers like decorationsfor a forgotten graduation party in a church basement.”—from “Diary Entry #5: Self-Portrait as Revelations Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.One of the first poems I ever wrote . . .
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Evelina looked for peace and quiet. To find it, she woke up before everybody else: before her father who had to get to the fields an at early hour, before her mother and grandmother who had chores to do, before her older siblings who went to school, and before the younger ones . . .
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