Author: admin

The Xerox repairman enters the school. Students have all boarded buses away from monotony. I linger in the doorway of the copy room, thinking if the machine is repaired soon, I will run tomorrow’s test. He is...

In 1950, I could play in the middle of the intersection of Hinman Avenue and Sixth Street beneath streetlight without fear of the occasional car smashing into me. A motley troop of us gathered there nightly, mindful of our...

She dives under gloss of waves, tangles in yellow webs of surface sun, stands in waist high water. Streams of the Atlantic drain from dazzling shoulders. When she reaches shore, her weightless shadow seeks balance, blinks a...

They pass all day, and much of the night, wailing with urgency, scrabbling for hope down in the valley, but out of sight from where I live on the hill’s dark slope. Ambulance, fire, police – I can’t know, a tree-caught cat or a...

At the field’s end, visible from the kitchen window, the gate gives onto the coast path. Beyond are sea-wrack, rock-pools where anemones curl; colours opal and royal blue, glowing as oils. The lagoon shelters a lone barnacle...

When I was a stock boy at the drug store, Jim was twenty-five and I was twenty-three. When I said pharmaceutical, he laughed at me. “That’s a pretty big word you’ve got there.” I resented his seventeen-dollars-an-hour, newest...

Finally, you’re dead! Well then, it happened anyway. I must say, you planned it perfectly: No tubes, IVs or beeping machines, No nursing home purgatory. Consider all that fuss over Breathing and dreaming, Making love, making...

Certainly no farmer, I was afraid, A skinny, anxious Fourteen or fifteen, Barely beyond a boy, Scarcely defined as man. Grandpa laid up in bed, Cows needed milking, Udders taut, teats leaking, Frothy white on black mud,...

I bought a one-way ticket to Canada. Dad drove me to the bus station at the end of West Gambier Street not knowing when or if I’d return. (When I was little, Dad never quite knew what to do with me.) Wordlessly we waited for the...

Gotham cannot sleep. The city toils overnight to bury its dead. Collected four at a time, New Yorkers are stacked like cordwood, names compiled, and bodies piled into a Black Mariah. Grim though the job is, the apartment blocks...