Issue 64

I’ve always felt I’m someone who could approach her own beheading with unvarnished resignation, no sprees of weeping or remorse; dressed, if I were lucky, in a murky red gown newly made by a servant who would miss me; if not, in a muslin shift worn fine and bleached by countless afternoons drying on mothy…

He’s Isaiah sometimes, sometimes Elijah, or even the Son of Man, though no one on earth would ever see a prophet—much less a divinity— in Willie, back on probation, rumpled and stinking. His lank hair’s dyed a color not found in nature. His lips clamp a roll-your-own smoke gone cold. I’m a coward. I play…

Kayak on the quarry: will you hug the shore, push straight across, waver or dawdle? No paths on the water. Almost November, and the poison ivy is still green. The soft trap of sky closes all around. An artful little spray of leaves near the shore, as though Martha Stewart were sitting in for God.…

On the swift cruise there was only time and water, twin mothers of an anxious son. And money. In the long end of day we pushed right at the sun and failed again except at witness, the beauty softened by mist and latitude until we could almost bear it. What else could we do? We…

Yes love, I must confess I’m at it again, struggling in vain with my Greek declensions. I know it’s common, but I want to show you what I found in Praxeis Apostolon, chapter one, verse twenty-four: this exquisite epithet, kardiognosta. Forget briefly its context, that the eleven, genuflecting, implore the Lord to give wisdom. Between…

Taped to a red “College/Career Info” catalog box near this block’s crowded sidewalk bistro, one business envelope. Please pray for my husband Cliff for his health. He is very, very ill. God loves you, Dedra. Maybe hung just that day, ten minutes since. Looks more like a week, open but not torn, faded script &…

A chic Italian restaurant here on Rutherford’s Park Avenue. On the corner across the street: your home, sold to strangers. All those bright flowers you & Flossie tended to in your backyard gone. A piece of still-warm bread & a bottle of Chianti I had to bring myself. It’s a dry town still, where the…

Huge schools of them, home from the Atlantic: flakes of iced mercurial steel, each body surging upstream through the flint-flecked crevices as in a dream, entering the crush of falls to reach the upper lakes. Spent now by the journey, they have returned in a bright kenotic ecstasy to spawn at last and die. A…

Blessed be God for thaw, for the clear drops that fall, one by one, like clocks ticking, from the icicles along the eaves. For shift and shrinkage, including the soggy gray mess on the deck like an abandoned mattress that has lost its inner spring. For the gurgle of gutters, for snow melting underfoot when…

for A.M. Fine I Molest the dead. Take from them their buried honey. Envy them their past perfect tense, their had done and hurried gone. Harry them, for bars of iron cannot deter their passing. Hate, heat, hoar cannot injure their integument nor corrupt what worms have gowned and mastered with their ferried van lines…