The Princess of Pop remembered being a kid back in Louisiana on her cousins’ wide wooden swing, climbing so high that with one release of the chain links she might sail off into the clouds...
My mother found me living a new life on an island off the coast of Maine where a lighthouse on a rocky finger of land sheltered my solitude. A society designed to preserve the past had offered me refuge in exchange for being present, for walking on floors and opening doors, for filling musty rooms with my breath. I was the lighthouse caretaker...
When I carved a rose the size of my palm to give to her, a sliver of stone flew into my right eye and carved it out. Well, I still had one eye and the feeling in two hands and heart. She allowed me to kiss her but nothing more.
On the Tokyo trains we stand close as lovers, while men in white gloves push us closer together. On top of each other, elbows fill empty spaces and faces leave streaks on the windows. We move as one body, sway hard, back again.
What Rachel didn’t know about the letters she wrote to Private First Class Moralez was that sometimes he ate them. He would read them from beginning to end and then he would lick the paper. He would run his finger along the jagged edges where Rachel had torn the paper from her spiral notebook, imagining her fingers pulling on the page and the tightly coiled metal resisting as it ripped.
Didn’t I make a nice spread for all of you? I did. I watch you, with your temporary names and bodies, mingle and hover and talk about why you are here and who you are here for, or about other things. Sometimes you shut your mouths. That’s fine too. I put cocktail napkins in your hands, and you cradle finger foods. I gave you coffee and tea, wine and beer, pastrami and challah and babka. Two babkas, in fact—one cinnamon and one chocolate. It was all there waiting for you when you drove here in ones and twos and threes and fours from the field of stones, where we lowered her into the ground, all of us together, where I will keep her and she will not mind the cold.
He reeked of sweat and wine and rotting fish, and so did everyone else who sat shivering and trapped in the gristled black of the beast. The man squatted alone in his tweed rags to prod the thick shallows with a sharpened pole. He waited, silver-haired and asthmatic with his hands shaking and coralled over in splinters. He couldn't see a thing, there, in that sweating dark.
Miriam and Dorothy are just getting to be best girlfriends again. They hadn’t spoken for a while over a silly disagreement about some money Dorothy had loaned her. Then Charlie, Miriam’s second husband, got drunk and shot himself.
To get to my job at the Quick ‘n Easy convenience store, I would cut behind the Catholic school, through the Chevy lot where my father used to work, and down the stretch of St. Mary’s Avenue that was squeezed between the old folks’ home and the cemetery.