Tilty
Tilty Gringot frowns at the fresh face of the morning and draws shut the curtains. He is an ambler and a shuffler, Tilty, and as he walks from the window to the kitchen small flurries of dust obscure his feet and gather about the legs of his pajama pants. He opens the fridge, and his […]
Why I Love Howl
I loathe romance. I was the girl who laughed hysterically at the many public declarations of love made in Love, Actually and the tender resolution to any and all Meg Ryan movies; flowers, candlelight dinners and heart-shaped boxes of chocolate should be kept away from me lest I lose all interest in someone, no matter […]
Panning for Gold
The show goes up in the Armory. The stage area – a high-ceilinged opening, difficult to describe and even more difficult to see in the dim blue light – surrounds two rows of mismatched chairs. The audience sits in the center of the space, dressed in their Houseparties formalwear. There are sculptures on the walls […]
The Rest Is Silas
One of my primary introductions to the Arts, and more specifically the Performing Arts, was through the little-known genre of Modern Dance called “Site-Specific Dance-Poetry Fusion.” I have been taken with this unique blend of spoken and written words and dance since I was a child, and have done much reading about it, including the seminal works Poetry, and also Dance by Klaus Fuchten and Movement through Word in a Particular Place by the legendary Mary Timrock. Oh god, I’m lying!
Feminism: 1, Assault: 0
A couple Fridays ago, joined by the presidents of Kappa and Pi Phi, I spoke as the Theta representative at Take Back the Night. The evening was frantically managed, with speakers from what seemed like every organization on campus standing up to say that—surprise!—they were all against sexual assault. We were there to show the […]
Body Body…Deion Sanders?
Deion Sanders is flying into town this weekend to see BodyHype’s spring show, so I really can’t see why you wouldn’t just make the ten minute trek over to Theater Intime. No really. Neon Deion has been text messaging BodyHype president Natasha Kalimada ’07, whom he met while clubbing in Puerto Rico this year over […]
An Interpretation of Love by Marc Chagall
He presses his wrist into my breast and wraps his hand around my neck palm and fingers enfolding my ivory veil. His eyes devour the lights from three wax candles, one burning with a viridian flame. Unaware of the wind licking his hair, cast by the open and close of angels’ wings, with white skirts […]
Quite the Fourth
1 Black night sky pierced by bursting bubbles of color. Brilliance rains down on the back patio, singing blood-red bricks. Flames—leaping, dancing, hoping to escape—curl around the logs in the semi-lunar pit. Vigilant mothers reprimand squabbling children, “Don’t you dare put that sparkler in Claire’s mouth.” Fathers guzzle bottled beers, their cause a noble one; […]
North
Coming up a stairwell, I stop. A custodian, a man holding a feather duster, has also stopped at the midway landing to let two women pass. They descend to the landing, past the man and the duster, then past me, and I recall nothing of them but a single red shoe. It’s a dull thing, […]
Pills
Those pills, those—what were they?—those pills we ate are going crazy. My limbs are, like, exploding off me. I feel great. You look very pretty now. I mean, I feel great! How do you, how do you feel? Not going to speak to me? Is mums the word? Is mums a word? Do you know […]
O Canada
Apparently contemporary fiction is suffering from an infusion of effeminate, lazy, timid and predictable male writers. Or at least that’s the impression I get from the Canadian-based publisher Raincoast and the sprinkling of various reviewers who are championing former Nassau Weekly editor Nathan Sellyn ’04’s literary debut Indigenous Beasts as a “daring collection of fiction” from “a bold, young writer whose work is masculine, energetic, and shocking.” For the record, I have no idea what a “masculine” piece of fiction could be, beyond containing a bunch of tough-guy male characters (but, then again, so does a lot of gay erotica).
Grace
Sig loves me. He’s sitting at the counter, eating a bagel right now, but I know he’s thinking about me. Today, like every Sunday, he sits all day here in this café where I work. A man across the coffee shop is pulling his knit cap down over his ears, stressing the threads and busting […]
Another Way of Missing You
In the French, tu me manques – you are missing to me. You are missing to me, to my body, to my arms which starve on air, to my eyes which dream up the shape of you in everything. You are missing to my fingertips and the roots of my hair, to my toes, to […]
Your father’s faults
We were sixteen when they evacuated the gymnasium in the middle of the English exam (anonymous bomb threat, year after Columbine). I was writing on Roethke – not the poem we’d read in class and most everyone agreed told the story of an abusive father and forgiving son, but one about a root cellar in […]
Breakfast-time
At dawn she sneaks blood oranges From the grange- Land, and the seeded pulp and the climbing (where the farmers’ fence is Rough) have painted orange- Red her picking arm. For several Mornings now I’ve seen her range Her pickings in a row—the smallest smaller Than a hummingbird, the largest larger than the clock’s face […]
The Gates of Life
A French damsel and I decided to take a train To New York to see the Gates and be at play. You were late to the Dinky and had to book It to meet me by the stop to pause, smoke, and spring Off the platform—covered in Bohemian clothes, your petite frame We set off […]
The Factor Goes Fictive
Bill O’Reilly is obsessed with how long it takes a murder victim to die. In his novel – that’s right, his novel – we find out, for example, that “the soft tissue gave way quickly and the steel penetrated the correspondent’s brain stem. Ron Costello was clinically dead in four seconds.” Or, “Lance Worthington couldn’t feel the razor-sharp box-cutter blade slice through his throat…. it was exactly two seconds before he lost consciousness.” Some deaths come even quicker: “A slab of sizzling white hot metal fell directly on his head. Death for Shannon Michaels came one second later.”
Sonnet 34
Amore e Mona Lagia e Guido ed io Possiam be ringraziare un Ser costui Che n’ha partiti, sapete da cui? Nol vo’ contrar per averlo in oblio. Poi questi tre più non v’hanno disìo; Ch’eran serventi di tal guisa in lui, Che veramente più di lor non fui, Immaginando ch’elli fosse Iddio. Sia ringraziato Amor, […]
Visit to Menninger Clinic
I’m angry for my brother’s television set with its lumpy men. He is supposed to be excited for my visit. He likes his rehab friends, two of them play chess under the ping pong table, feet sticking out arbitrarily. I hand him a bag with a cd and a book in it. The attendant asks […]
