Unsettle
on
Tell me we’ll never get used to it. Richard Siken, 2005 The boy didn’t know what to do with sounds that entered his head and became something else. His parents would soon be caught in the glare of their weekly murder mystery, its theme a barrage of horns lingering too long on the tonic, the… More
Star-Taker
on
She’s on her way to my grandmother’s apartment door and listens to the elevator make that little breathing sound, that unsteady inhalation, as it travels from her penthouse at 10 Gracie Square to our 8th floor. I can almost hear her remembering my paternal grandmother, the woman she’s thought of as Esther from when she… More
Four Ways In
on
They were two 12 year old boys fighting sleep in an attic room, wondering when their balls would drop and why fathers were so strange. They stretched across the top bunk of the bed unit that was theirs for the summer, bopping feet over its edge and squishing crotches on the coverlet, eyeing what they’d… More
The Storied Cry
on
I know that when self-interest becomes a flaming light, its burst into self-serving shudders everything that it touches. More
Get under It
on
On this late Sunday night, halfway through July, I listen to the wood thrush outside our kitchen window. His song’s upward curl fills the back garden two stories below, butts against the humid air, and makes all of Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill his sound. Behind me, in our bedroom, the man I’ve loved for 15 years… More
Leaving Lessons
on
Fin and Flesh For years beyond counting, she lived far under water among the green things. Their shine resembled that light before the storm comes above ground, as if seen through the veins of a new leaf held close to the eye, in a time so distant that its tale must have been whispered in… More
Imaging Figures #7: Actionable Bodies
on
The wolf is entitled to the lamb. The Mountain Wreath (1847) You would not believe how many words there are for home and what savage music there can be wrung from it. Edna O’Brien (2015) For months now, I’ve seemed to live in a crowd of stories. The second epigraph to Edna O’Brien’s recent novel,… More
Uplift
on
The world is never done with you. Ellen McLaughlin (lyrics)/Sarah Kirkland Snider (music), Penelope (2010) If he were a sentence, he would be weighted with prepositions. They’d mark the things and people he chose, or felt compelled, to carry. With words like from, to, over, under, and across as harbingers, aimed at what happens just… More
Beatrice amid the Rectangles
on
I want to cross the road in my naked feet. I want to introduce you to Planter’s Punch. I want to go on declaring since, as a child, I was forbidden to make a single one, and I have all that time to stand up for. Beatrice Straight and I were pausing in the middle… More
Imaging Figures #6
on
On Woolf, Plato, and the pricking pain that enhances what the eye can take. More
Bett, Talking
on
When I think of him, I remember the mirrors in his eyes, where anyone who stood in front of him seemed to live. I was in there for a time, too, off to the side and as if in the middle of moving out. More
Imaging Figures #5
on
“There,” on the “slab outside the dining room door,” Virginia Woolf reports in A Sketch of the Past (1939-1940), Gerald Duckworth, her much older half-brother, begins to “explore” her “body” (69). She is still “very small” (69). He digs down “under” the “clothes,” into “certain parts” which “must not be touched”; the sense that “it… More
Counting
on
Our Aunt Fanny began her measuring that summer while dusk stood outside her bedroom windows, preparing to stoop and slide through the screens. She was our father’s maternal cousin, daughter of Senator Joe B, as our grandmother cared to call him, because of the way he clunked ice cubes in whiskeys too fine for the… More
Boy in the Crosswalk
on
‘Anybody who voluntarily takes an antiviral every day has to have rocks in their heads. . . . There’s something to me cowardly about taking Truvada instead of using a condom. You’re taking a drug that is poison to you, and it has lessened your energy to fight, to get involved, to do anything.’ Larry… More
Leeway
on
I’m just an animal, looking for a home. – David Byrne/Talking Heads (1983). ‘I am‘ includes all that has made me so. – John Berger (2013). I taught two classes that day, beginning at 9:30. Crossing Waverly Place, coffee warming the cardboard cup in my right hand, sensing the ground rumble, the sky groan, I… More
The Fire Says
on
What might it mean to be drawn into meanings that, in some profound and necessary sense, shatter us? Christian Wiman: My Bright Abyss (2013) At six years old, distant enough from the ground to realize that you can connect the closely seen and the far away, the detail and an extension of details, I began… More
Imaging Figures #4
on
Thinking of one of Cezanne’s still lifes, say his Pommes of 1878-1882–which John Maynard Keynes bought “on his own behalf” after purchasing, for the National Gallery, nineteen works from the Degas collection auctioned in Paris in March 1918–I am reminded of its disembarkation-tale, which Quentin Bell reports in “A Cezanne in the Hedge” (1992, 138).… More
Gnossienne for Lisa
on
Over the last few nights, half-longing for sleep, I’ve seen Lisa as she was at 14, the two of us almost side by side, about to take the front steps of East Hampton High School for the first time. More
(Interlude: Essay-Story #2)
on
The world we are born into is not the one we leave. Mary Ruefle: Madness, Rack, and Honey, 243, 2012. 1938’s Marie Antoinette burbles up another ball scene on the television aspark in a corner of the bedroom, the one to the right of the wall of windows looking out, if windows, like eyes, could… More
(Interlude: Essay-Story #1)
on
Dr Siegel says You’ve tested negative, and you imagine that the hook hidden in his mouth pierces through each word: his bottom lip sticks against his teeth on negative, as though he could hardly bear to let it go. But Dr. Siegel is like that with words. You remember–when you came before–the particular kind of… More