A Poem.

Near dusk, we owe an appropriate fear
to the light that may not show on the hilly
back of the morning beast.

There were cities that stood boulder-like in the distance
There were cities that I loved
There were cities where kites could ease greedily among the buildings
There were cities in which no honest man could find a life to suit him
There were cities that were paved with little Pandora ...

I was wearing a woman’s bathrobe and galoshes, and had tied a scarf around my waist. I was too conscious of touch, by then, to wear regular clothing. But I needed to talk to Professor Litvak again, so I had to wear something.

A Translation

I heard the subway pouring out of your mouth.
I thought, maybe, it was an early-morning thing, letting sleep
spill from your body onto the week-worn floor.
I didn’t ask you to reveal this to me, I cling to
the milky curtain that lets you stay a hanging portrait.

Enough of this, this mania, and the fear that your body will turn against you.
Keep waking up in the empty morning and its thin light,
and everything will be the same for the rest of us.
This should calm you: that nobody can see the blood that’s been ...

The frantic thrust
against a worn beach front.
The need to fling upwards
and the sickening curling under
of a mind
changing suddenly.

Disappointment characterized not the first birth, but the second in the amniotic procession the twins enacted on May 16, 1978. It was the first of many staged productions for the energetic children of withered opera rose Emilia Hemmings. Emilia knew just what she was getting, no surprises for her. Only ...

It was completely dark when they got back to the hotel. The night was warm and the windows wide open.

Emma and Dani were sprawled out on the bed in Dani’s room snorting cocaine with a one hundred dollar bill and a small mirror that had once belonged to Dani’s pink jewelry box. The kind with the ballerina that you had to wind; when the box opened, the ballerina would twirl around and around to The Russian Dance from The Nutcracker. Bones protruded from Dani’s hip through her translucent skin, and her gaunt face sagged. Her piercing blue eyes were dulled by thick black eyeliner, and the heavy bronzing makeup coating her face obscured her wan teenage skin. Dani took a big hit and laid back on her simple white bed, sniffling loudly and pawing at her nose.

Hi, this is Danny Aiello, I was the guy talking to your sister this afternoon around 4:30, the Elvis? Listen, I just wanted to ask you if you could tell her to give me a call because well, as you know, I just met her today and I thought ...

...

Whether or not we agree that the iPod somehow essentializes the twentyfirst century--an intriguing claim, if not intentionally exaggerated--the more general principle underlying that claim is reasonable enough: the idea that one might “read the state of the cultural spirit [Geist] off of the sundial of human technology.” (1)

I don’t really examine things too closely. Everything is not a work of art. I’m not like those academics, those writers that go along looking for the meaning of the world in everything that they find on the street.

I call you my friend, Mr. Python.

A Short Story.

At 10:16 yesterday morning, I received an e-mail from my mother. The message was three sentences long, and only the first four words were in English: Bác Hai is dying.

A Poem.

A Poem.

Two days before, I was alone, thinking about what it must feel like to have a heart that beats when it wants, attune to no one and free to roam around the range of time like a novice drummer. Thinking only about the next lub dub and not about the ...

The thin strap of a duffel bag cut into Milo’s shoulder as he stood on the front step of the old house where he grew up. He studied a painfully new, gold mailbox that dangled a limp newspaper in its protruding tongue. He studied how it contrasted so sharply ...

Looking back, I can recount— although perhaps, at times, incompletely, and often, I admit, sensationally—— a brief episode between my four-year-old self and a close childhood friend: a young girl named Mary, similarly diminished in age and stature, a miniature co-star, with whom I shared an afternoon that I will always remember.

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