-
Playing Telephone
And the winner for the 2008 Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off is… Bill Lane!” Bill leaned into his wife for a kiss. His son beamed and Bill acknowledged the little boy’s pride with a hearty shake of his shoulder. Bill rose and to acknowledge the audience’s cheers, he smiled, clutched his enormous belt buckle between…
-
The Assumption
From “The Assumption,” a short play based on the medieval Lives of the Virgin. The hero is Mario, a college freshman struggling with his sexuality who mistakes an undiagnosed case of appendicitis for a pregnancy. In this scene, he has been confiding in Lupe, the dorm’s janitress, who reveals herself to be the Virgen de…
-
Vignettes from the Hinterlands
On the seventieth anniversary of Ataturk’s death I was in the mountains between Van and Diyarbakir with a baby on my lap and her three year old brother stretched out on the seat behind me while their mother tried to sleep, the silk scarf slipping from her hair.
-
‘Einstein, Margarita, and the Bomb’
On a damp Friday afternoon in November, traversing the broad, entirely empty main courtyard has the feeling of trespassing. Whitman’s Class of 1970 theater is the setting, this particular Friday afternoon, for a screening of ‘Einstein and Margarita,’ a so-called “media opera” composed by Iraida Iusupova and with libretto by Iusupova and the poet Vera…
-
‘The Balcony’
I am on my balcony. I have been here for three days and two nights. It was my wife who put me here. It happened like this: At dawn, when we wake, she wakes, I see: she, simulacrum of sweetie, presently bovine sweetie, clodhopper lovely, trundle fatly to her boudoir to assess the damage: six…
-
The Affection of Style
James Frey might be the most inarticulate author alive. Also, if he is not one of the most boring, he is clearly the most bored, and his prose is so harried, so egregiously imprecise, that it reads as if it is trying to flee the very tedium of the subject matter.
-
Selections from Poem to Be Read in Order
“Do you see those women standing by the river, their reflections cut up by the waves, under the shadow of pierless piles?”
-
I Am Trying To Break Your Heart
1. Lines removed from a play The answer’s in the desk. Oh, yes! This PROBABLY cures cancer. Meta! THE OL’ ONE-TWO! A dog eats a cell phone and it keeps ringing in its stomach. Oh, no! …eats the whole thing. …as explained by a Chorus. Baby talk. NO! Animal talk. NO! Baby talk. NO! ANIMAL…
-
“Thing”
The first time you die, almost always, you get a feeling in the pit of your stomach, as though someone’s taken the bottom out. It feels like it does when an airplane is landing with you inside, as though all the strings of muscle and tendon holding your insides in place are being strummed by…
-
-
I had a cough all my life. It stood by my side.
Near dusk, we owe an appropriate fear to the light that may not show on the hilly back of the morning beast. Mother takes our picture at sunset. Her finger pushing and begging that button to hold everything still, appeases us. Thus the wind is captured into an airtight frame, to be developed at will,…
-
Mapping Nowhere
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’s boxes There were cities where…