Issue 13
I miss you the way I miss mooring docks and bright blue boats and the fine frizzled fray of a slip knot; or a wooden…
“Thank God we’ve never had any of that in our family,” your mother tells you for the umpteenth time, though her own father had dementia…
The road through El Remate never went straight, but the thought of moving was slender and vulnerable, curling toward, then away from us. All day,…
Even that bathroom fan, the one we talked of replacing in those years before our daughters. But the first came home in December, and that…
Marcos said: Yesterday, like a fool I traded away the thirty years I had left in my life for a 1959 Volkswagen Beetle. I can…
From where we are standing on the Fifth Street Bridge, we can see an oval body stream through the sluggish water of the Conewango Creek.…
There’s some dispute in the family about whether my grandmother actually hit my grandfather when she fired a pistol in his direction as he clambered…
The banjo player met the devil and asked the devil if he wanted to make a deal, but he talked so slow the devil got…
We were sitting at a table on the sidewalk just down from Union Square and the massive shoe warehouses, the crowds of people watching a…
On the drawbridge that crosses the Halifax River, we have to wait for a shrimp boat to pass, its nets raised, its deck littered with…
I. The caddies in the background stare Down fairways at the latest lies, And foursomes toss their madras ties Behind their backs, shift feet, and…
When anyone asks what I do, I say, “I’m a poet and writer.” This is true now, and it has always been true, although for…
Every move I make is gestured by a slight prediction: I go down on my side and roll up the hill; a cloud wants me,…
met Manya on spring break in ’86. In studying more advanced arithmetics, “Maria” was her birth name; “Manya” stuck the most important law is one…
First, a fence, then a gate. Alone in the morning’s bright imprecision, you know when you find the cave of the woman. Last night, Lawrence…
Andrea disliked flying not because she felt out of control or endangered—a mere metaphor for life in general and hers in specific—but because even with…
When we stole you we also took the kitchen’s largest pot and three round loaves of bread. The pot you slept in sometimes. The loaves…
The trick, she used to say, is to imagine it’s all beautiful, but that beauty has its place, or many places, that there is not…
Some nights, you sing, in-tune and off Your rocker, keeping time with two spoons beat Against your thigh, a sweet And husky “Down in the…
Arm draped like a debutante’s around her stag’s long white neck, she’s not so school-girl gorgeous after all. No swift strong hands to brush back…
In seats mud-rusted from the years of use we perched, drawn in the wake of the blue tractor: its tires, black and deep-cut, tread like…
You in a hotel lobby— no, your double, trench-coated man with leonine hair. My sternum on fire, the room still cocktail-hour dim with small lamps…