One breezy October afternoon, Eddie left work and drove to Parham’s Lounge. The route led through Springfield’s rough inner-city streets, ones that needed paving and were lined with run-down houses that cried for renovation....
Read MoreLying in bed, regaling me with tales about his father’s morgue, Bird rocked his head back and forth, led by the birdlike beak of a snow-white nose. I watched and listened from my bunk in the closet-sized room we shared in Breen...
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The night before departure, Delhi came to my dreams as a woman in black robes and a fast chase and a land that shifted underfoot. Were it not for the trailing of fuchsia and golden saris, the masala, the stray dogs prostrated in...
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As useless as a sterile seed inside a pod, the astronaut looks into space while the dark side of the blue world passes. The silent radio, the gerbil cage now empty, even gauges bobbing loose no longer trouble her. A spider spins...
Read MoreOn the longest day I lie back in meadow grass, dry and yeasty; it prickles my back. Clouds slide along on prevailing westerlies, merge and dissipate, a shifting menagerie. Behind a silver plane a contrail dissolves like...
Read MoreComing to the meadow’s slopping boundary, traffic jams and minutia’s fog behind me, I push through the cattywampus thatch gate. Birdsong echoes fade, rebound, repeating among the trees and slopes instead of voices dropping names...
Read MoreAs a favour for my friend Kelly, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party of Canada, I walk an oversized Rottweiler – coat glossy brown, haunches as high as my head. On the trim public green, amidst leaping children, the...
Read MoreThis was Malaysia not Amazonia and our guide hadn’t warned us of any fish until one of our coeds screamed bloody murder and lifted from the lake a tipless toe gushing crimson, and I thought, as I held a first-aid kit for my...
Read MoreHow are you doing? Nathan McClain Zooms in on Ada Límon. Ada, smiling, pauses. Um. Okay, she says. What else can any of us say besides Sick, Angry, Appalled, Depressed, Dying, but Okay with the saddest of smiles and hope we...
Read Moreafter a daguerreotype of “Aunt Jane & Uncle Jerry,” an enslaved couple in Virginia “on their wedding day.” They look rather old for newly-weds, and so I doubt the Daguerreotype was truly taken on...
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