from The Body Papers

posted in: Nonfiction | 0

  One morning in the spring when I was seven years old, I woke up a puffy pink monster. My lips had disappeared into a mass of swollen flesh, my earlobes were triple their usual size, and my cheeks were … Read More

My Father’s Teeth

posted in: Nonfiction | 0

  My father saved his teeth by lying through them. Somewhere on the border between Russia and Poland, pines and rifles, in the nineteen-teens, he went off to the woods with two other boys to visit the village horses hidden … Read More

The Sharp White Background

posted in: Reviews | 0

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine (Graywolf Press, 2014); Forgiveness Forgiveness by Shane McCrae (Factory Hollow Press, 2014).   Claudia Rankine and Shane McCrae are both writers who directly, clearly, and pointedly approach the past and present injustices inherited … Read More

Vanishings and Returns

posted in: Reviews | 0

  Second Childhood: Poems by Fanny Howe (Graywolf Press, 2014); Our Vanishing by Frannie Lindsay (Red Hen Press, 2014).   New books by Fanny Howe and Frannie Lindsay explore facets of faith and aging. A passage from the title poem … Read More

Humping the Bush

posted in: Fiction | 0

  There is a photograph of our father in an olive drab T-shirt and jungle fatigues, his still-plentiful hair clipped close to his head. He’s crouched on a bald knob of rock, the shade of loblolly pines darkening one side … Read More

La Vita è Bella

posted in: poetry | 0

  I know what happens in the end. I’ve seen the movie many times. The young son makes it. The father, he dies   strutting cheerfully for his son in front of the Nazi’s rifle. But let me delay   … Read More

Fire in the Hole

posted in: poetry | 0

  Once I was air- borne, brief gust, thrown from the hot white metal of a car—   do I have to go? I asked the paramedic. He buckled me to the gurney, raised me   into the ambulance. The … Read More

The Dogs

posted in: poetry | 0

  The dogs began to bark. The dogs were almost always barking. Whenever someone would approach the house or just walk by, the dogs would bark. But C and S could tell that this barking was different. They could hear … Read More

1 2 3 4 6