The colors are off. Muted, like a confession. That’s what drew me to it, this rug in the middle of my living room floor. I found it enchanting. We’d lost our first to moths—what could we do? It was their season. I didn’t know how to save things. This one would be different.
Where does it all begin? God is good; woman bleeds. It was the depression or before. You were cooking over an open greasy fire and the house burned to the ground. And you were cutting the heads off chickens and laughing at the horror of them walking backward and dancing. And you were slitting the
I’m talking with Mike over coffee. His wife recently left him. He’s lonely. We’re both carpenters, a couple of old guys in baseball caps plying the trade. We can frame a wall and hang a door, we can read a set of blueprints. But when it comes to women . . . I’m thinking
Of patience, I know only what sea turtles have taught me: how they are born on lightless beaches so the moon can serve as a beacon to lure them into the water; how they spend their whole lives trying to swim towards it, enamored, obsessed; how they flap their forelimbs, a vague recollection of flying—
Even when they danced, Dad couldn’t keep her in his arms. She’d spin off, leave him to fade back into the circle of others, clapping, hooting. Days when the pond would freeze, mothers took their children’s hands and worried them around in slow circles. Mom raced in uncharitable loops past me and
Behind the house in a field there’s a metal box I buried full of childhood treasure, a map of my secret place, a few lead pennies from 1943. The rest I’ve forgotten, forgotten even the exact spot I covered with moss and loam. Now I’m back and twenty years have made so little difference
My religion makes no sense and does not help me therefore I pursue it. When we see how simple it would have been we will thrash ourselves. I had a vision of all the people in the world who are searching for God massed in a room on one side of a partition that looks
Giants are much too beautiful. They live in a house called bigger dimensions They never suffer from delusions of grandeur and I have met many giants and this is always true A giant will always pity you Still, giants sleep with their eyes on their business which mainly now is the killing of tourists
I became a criminal when I fell in love. Before that I was a waitress. I didn’t want to go to Chicago with you. I wanted to marry you, I wanted Your wife to suffer. I wanted her life to be like a play In which all the parts are sad parts. Does a good
You can’t stop mourning everything all the time. The 90s, the black Maxima with a tail, CD wrappers, proximity to the earth. Glamour and sweating in your sheets. Speaking tongues. JLo even. Men even. You are a woman now but you have always had skin. Here are some ways in which you are not free:
