ISSUES | summer 2007

In the Mississippi Delta it goes like this: Memphis with its blue lights; Highway 49 a lonesome road of cypress swamps and Tuesday-night juke joints; the river, in all kinds of brown and foaming glory, stepping gracefully down to meet you somewhere south of Vicksburg.

I’m nine, I’m thirteen, I’m twenty-two and a football’s sailing over my head as I run full out, a step ahead of the guy behind me, my arms stretched to their limit. When the ball descends between my arms, my hands press just enough of it to grip it and pull it to me as I keep running, all the way over the goal line….the point is, I ran. Like you. I jumped, stretched, danced, did everything a body does, and more than many. In a world where I was the smallest boy, and by a lot, I kept up.

Cherry Lane Theater, in Manhattan’s West Village, is not located on Cherry Lane at all, but on Commercce Lane (nowhere near the Financial District of Lower Manhattan). It’s a venerable theater company that has been around for years, not very big, nowhere near broadway, tucked in a corner on one of the most beautiful neighborhoods in New York: an urban paradise.

The full text of this poem is not currently available online.

The year I became a summertime blonde, I moved through air thick as mink, lingered most evenings at Bloom School.   I turned slowly on the lowest swing, let dirt…    read more

[This poem was featured as a Poem of the Week, March 3, 2009.] “East of Carthage: 9” Southwest of here is Apuleius’s hometown, his inescapable destination having spent his inheritance…    read more

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On Saturday, S’is visited Maximon and gave him a cigar, a pint of liquor–Quezalteco–and a tart of blackberries. The cigar and Quetzalteco were Maximon’s usual gifts, but berry tart was not. The tart was his wife’s idea.

We could hear it from any point in the house–upstairs, downstairs, even the garage. From the kitchen the sound was faint, like the upswing of a snore with no silent intervals in between: all intake of breath, no release.

They say every girl remembers that special day when everything starts to change….

“Don’t you want to hear what the big news is?” said Dad. My mother turned her back on us to the cutting board, where she was chopping a fresh salad.

In a small voice I said, “Yes.” I tried to smile, but that feeling was in my stomach, made more fluttery by drink. I recognize the feeling now as a kind of knowledge.

The history of the United States is as replete with mistakes and distasters as that of other nations, despite our not unusual tendency to admire ourselves and view the past through a haze of nostalgia. I do it myself.

A jogger spotted the body hanging from the cell tower. At first he thought it was a mannequin. That’s what he told Z-21, the local NBC affiliate. The way the wind blew it, the way it flopped limply, made it appear insubstantial, maybe stuffed with straw.