Again and again we put our sweet ghosts on small paper boats and sailed them back into their death, each moving slowly into the dark, disappearing as our hearts visited and savored, hurt and yearned. —Jack Gilbert, from “Kunstkammer” There are other things besides monkeying around with words that are necessary, require commitment and discipline … Read more
A phone call late Halloween night can reduce your head to nothing but a fat band of static, all desire creeping slowly down your body and leaking out the bottoms of your feet. This crippled world keeps pushing us further and further into our hiding places. How much more can fall off this planet before … Read more
Soon enough he’d find himself behind the wheel of a parked car again, the location as inexplicable to him as it was irrelevant, the sound of gravel still rolling in his ears. A dark little patch of the world, the moon something he was vaguely aware of, a far away place where he wished he … Read more
If dogs could stand as small as humans, and on their hind legs, upright in a manner of speaking, and if they could negotiate the complexities of a phone booth and had change, or pockets for change, and if you could still find a functioning phone booth in this godforsaken city, I’d wish a lost … Read more
From the moment she was finished, shoved in a box, and buried under a shower of styrofoam peanuts, Bertie Rathbun understood that through some accident of God she had been given a soul. As she had been dangled in the air at the inspection station, and as her strings were jerked each in turn, jiggling … Read more
Many years ago, shortly after my arrival here, I discovered a hill in the middle of the city. This hill had long been a sanctuary of teen lust, the rocks and trees painted and carved with the arithmetic of young love. An old man who’d allegedly traveled the world would ride his bicycle each day … Read more
You can’t just plop your heart on the table every day, prod it with a fork, and expect it to give up its secrets. It can’t be shoved or bullied, and has never stood for interrogations. It speaks when it’s good and ready, and when it has something to say. There’s no small talk in … Read more
I have no one to blame but myself, I know that. I clearly blew what might have been a career-making opportunity. I’ve been trying all night to take the advice of my boss and look at this whole unfortunate situation as a ‘coachable moment,’ but it’s not easy, and, frankly, it really does make me … Read more
Odd shard, the moon. Last call. He lugs his iron head through the brass-clanging days. The dull trash-can gong of winter, a throbbing that starts in his fillings and swells clear up straining against the black cap of his underskull. Snow swept, dead silence, dead Saturday folding into Sunday morning. What is fog and what … Read more
This one guy, every couple weeks it’s these amazing places you can’t even believe, mountains and him standing in water or strung up on a cliff and hanging from ropes. He’ll bring in ten or twenty rolls of film at a time, and it’s gotten so that I look forward to seeing him come through … Read more