The famished ermine trimming the patron’s coat was meant as an emblem of wealth. Is this the real-time sorrow and how did Beurer bring it out on the patrician’s face through brumal medieval afternoons when they sit near each other as still as two lemons, —from “An Old Man in Great Trouble,” . . .
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The days had been dry, rainless. And even without rain, there was green there, sprouting in the backyard. That’s what he was thinking about that day and what he was going to ask Dad when he got home. Why the green was sprouting there, right in front of the step where he . . .
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When one braids togethera horseand a fence it isn’t pretty:mangle of mane and wire, twisted legscedar splints. Once on a hillin a far countryI watched some horses across a dust road—from “Range,” Volume 61, Issue 2 (Summer 2020) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.Hmmm. One piece, back in . . .
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You must go to Brno to see the rain. There are writers who have written almost exclusively about Brno and almost exclusively about what it’s like when it rains there. Brno in the rain is a sadder place than anywhere else in the world, but in a less personally inflected way: the . . .
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You unwittingly keep a catalogue of embarrassments on hand, lifetime-deep, ready to be flipped open to any page should the right moment present itself. The right moment is usually wrong, conventionally speaking: the bus driver doesn’t want to hear it, no matter what stop you’re at; stramgers waiting for the crossing signal . . .
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—a window opens and shuts;doors swing open, for a moment winddances in, dancesbackout, and again doorposts, doorposts, and hinges unyielding as warriors, and high doorsills, and locks, locks, like women in armor.— from (siege) . . .
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“What are you doing here?” Betania was standing on a corner, two blocks from home. Nervous. She wore an old dress and had her hair loosely tied up in a bun. If it weren’t for the carelessness of her appearance, she might have been taken for a novice prostitute. “What are you . . .
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Maggie fans her hand out on the windowpane. She brings her mouth close to the glass and huffs hot breath, leaving behind the web of her handprint ringed by fog. “Mom,” she says peering through the stencil, “I think there’s someone outside.” Maggie’s mother, Magalys, shoves her feet into slippers, grabs her . . .
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When does a cemetery become a field again? I stood before the shared gravestone of my great-great-grandparents and knew about them only what I’d learned that day. He was a minister and farmer, she a midwife who delivered babies around the turn of the last century for five dollars per live birth. . . .
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In a burst of concentration, I succeeded in catching the hen and stood withit in my hands. Strangely, it didn’t really feel alive:stiff, dry, an old whitefeather-riddled woman’s hat that shrieked out truths from 1912. Thunderhung in the air. A scent rose up from the fence boards, like when you opena photo . . .
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