ISSUES | summer 1990

Dan has been standing in the lobby for five minutes when a woman in a bathrobe runs up to him and starts to yell.

“You creep, you creep. How can you work for those people, those terrible, immoral people?” Her face and neck are flushed red with anger.

While she is screaming, Jerry Fuller, the man Dan is waiting for, comes strolling into the lobby. Dan knows it is Jerry from the way he’s looking around, examining the ceiling and fingering the peeling paint on the wall. Were this building a car, he’d be kicking the tires.

When the news that Dinah was getting involved with a married man fired through the family, her brother Cal called to remind her that men were like buses: there would be another one along in five minutes. He was handsome and affable, and he was speaking from personal experience.

A TASTEFUL REVOLUTION by Josip Novakovich Time: The first decade of XX century. Place: Potgrad, a small town in Slavonia—the southern province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Martha knelt to the…    read more

This poem was selected as a Poem of the Week (1/22/2008). At the Lake Even if the rain holds off awhile And our walk to the lake goes as we…    read more

Signifying Rappers “The schools in a portion of Boston stretching from just south of South Boston through Roxbury and into Dorchester are districted with a similar effect: the predominantly black…    read more

The phone wakes me. I fumble across her sheeted body to lift the receiver. It’s my old friend from the Writing Program, eighteen years now, a time before the boom.…    read more

“Most writers write too much, they work too much, they live too little, and they anguish too much.”

“Writing about a culture, where people no longer troubled themselves about what was good, but only about what was beautiful, fascinated me.”

“To Live In The Distances”
“This Faith”

My mother is missing. I left her sitting in the passenger side of my grey ’82 Toyota angle-parked downtown in front of the Quik Cleaners while I ran inside. Five minutes it took me, tops, two dresses, a skirt and one of Harry’s suits. I come back to the car. It’s parked slightly cockeyed, but legal. I look inside and it’s empty. At first I think I’m losing my mind. Maybe I took the other car, the Rabbit, but I never drive the Rabbit because of the brakes and the radio. I know I took the grey Toyota, which I always take, and anyway it’s there in front of the cleaners where I left it and my mother isn’t. She’s eighty-five years old; where could she be? She’s frail. She’s hard of hearing. She sees but not so well. I look around. Maybe she needed to pee or something. I go into the store next to Quik and ask if they have an old lady in the bathroom. They think I’m crazy. This is a dress shop for teenagers they tell me. I see that it is. The lights are flashing. The music is playing. The clothes are not real clothes. What would an old lady be doing in our bathroom? they say. I go back on the street and look again. She’s not there. I go back to the car and see the note. It’s on the front seat. We have your mother. Do not panic, it says. You hear that? Do not panic. Go home and wait for our call.

We knew nothing of explosives. But sometimes, at the end of lunch hour, we’d wake from our naps and remember that we were sleeping inside a bunker that stored 100,000 pounds of gunpowder. We’d wake–while those fleeting dreams we never recalled evaporated quickly from our heads–and squint at the sunlight that always hurt our eyes as it brightened the open front doorway of the bunker. Then we’d lift ourselves slowly from the tarpaper floor, which was coated with a layer of rubber so there wouldn’t be any sparks.

“If you break down on that reservation, your car belongs to the Indians. They don’t like white people out there.” This was our amiable motel proprietor in Custer, South Dakota, who asked where we were headed and then propped a conspiratorial white elbow on the counter and said we’d better make sure our vehicle was in good shape. To get to Wounded Knee, site of the last cavalry massacre of the Lakota in 1890 and of more recent confrontations between the FBI and the American Indian Movement, you take a road out of Pine Ridge on the Lakota Reservation and go about eight miles. If you weren’t watching for it you could miss it, because nothing is there but a hill, a painted board explaining what happened, a tiny church, and a cemetery.

Sara was dancing a little to keep her feet off the cold, gritty cement. The reflection in the glass doors stopped her: an enormous young woman, nearly six foot four…    read more

For each man or woman there are those buildings of childhood the mere thought of which years later is enough to reawaken the whole of the buried past. For me, there is the Troy Public Library where I sat by teh hours bewitched by the novels of Rafael Sabatini: Captain Blood, The Sea Hawk, and best of all, Scaramouche, that lovable scamp who “was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” Later, there is that house on Jacob Street where, at long last, I shucked my hated virginity. Most emblematic of all is the Gardner Earl Crematorium. Begun in 1887 and opened for use in 1902, the building stands on a ridge overlooking the city of Troy and, beyond that, the Hudson Valley through which the great river pushes on its way from the Adirondacks to Manhattan.