A few years ago, I placed my younger self into a poem dreaming of a potato-chip-flavored kiss. All-American kisses occured in lives where candy bars andsleeping with your hair wet were also permitted, where the attention of Americanmothers cast soft glowe through the house and clicked off at night.—from “Ars Poetica,” Volume . . .
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The living room is crowned by a painting, one that has no purpose other than to take precedence over the armchairs. In the scene there are two deer, grazing on a sparse, dry plain: everything is yellow, from the animals to the meadow to a shadeless sky at high noon. There is . . .
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If I write myself into a state, does that make the state false? In the background of one of the many pictures I take of Patrycja by the feeding ring,two of the horses bit each other. Without violence, how do I understand my life as meaningful?—from “Eastern Washington Diptych,” Volume . . .
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Photo by Ally Almore O taxi glass, O broken fall, be soprano, be alto.Give me sea sharp, give doh doh doh, give mi fa so?O gravity, slip soft. Lay with this sorry child before they soulsplint & ugly up this here garden.—from “The Lion Tamer’s Daughter vs. The Ledge,” Volume 63, Issue 1 . . .
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After Sophie’s love affairs had all gone sour, her life became a drought. Once full of lust and beauty, Sophie was now faded and dried, like a stalk of corn left too long in the sun. She drifted through the days at the tiny Denver packing and mailing shop where she workd, . . .
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I didn’t know many people who had gone to university. Neither Dad, nor Mom, nor my grandparents went. Still I knew more or less how university types dressed and even how they spoke, partly because my cousin was a veterinary student (though I barely saw him, and until he finally graduated, I . . .
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They came to meet him at the tiny airport in the town where he had attended medical college. As he went from his new house in Texas to the airport to New York and then London and Delhi, he had the sensation that the world was growing bigger and bigger. But on . . .
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We knew our answers, but they weren’t what you were looking for: What do you want to be when you grow up? Not married.A man with stronger arms than mine.A person with the courage to bite down.An evil queen.A horse.—from “Please Don’t Ask Us,” Volume 63, Issue 1 (Spring 2022) Tell us . . .
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Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, late September 2002. A beautiful fall morning. What was once called an Indian summer, but Jacob is learning to expunge such phrases from his lexicon: Indian summer. Dutch treat, French kiss. Is French kiss okay? Not that it matters; he hasn’t French kissed a guy in months.—from “Simple Past . . .
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The day I arrived on the butter schooner a cow had fallen off the cliff. Its carcass was found on the beach in the cove below, near the high tide line, by some men waiting to load the hogs and butter onto the boat for the return trip to San Francisco. Everyone . . .
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