Triptych: Portrait at Fifteen with Dog Swimming in Foreground
Whoever stopped rowing took this picture of me standing, fists in jacket pockets, beside the rotting pier, another potential failure, feature of the empty April beach, new companion to…
X-Factors: De Chirico
1. The Melancholy of Departure The removal began precisely as its planners had decided months earlier with names and ages and dispositions: dead, the dispositions always showed those to…
Between Lives: Cities I’ve Never Lived In: Stories by Sara Majka (Graywolf Press, 2016)
Sara Majka’s stories are imbued with longing for lost loved ones and lost homes in places where the narrator, Anne, has lived. But the stories are also about places…
Forgetting, Remembering: All That Followed by Gabriel Urza (Henry Holt and Company, 2015)
Following the thirty-six years of Generalissimo Franco’s dictatorial rule of Spain, the country began its swift transition to a democracy in 1975. The surrender of power was quick and…
Mapping: The Grammar of God by Aviya Kushner (Spiegel & Grau, 2015)
Grammar is not only a map to a new language, but a map into a new world. In the United States, where on the one hand, certain biblical verses…
The Tennis Ball
When I return to the dog, the first thing I see is the teeth. And then the dog disappears. But the teeth remain. Bared. Bereft of dog. The bared…
At the Orchard
We sit beneath a giant maple watching pirouettes of yellow gust upwards, each leaf an illumined skin stretched across a pliable spine. My son spins an apple between his…
Lessons of Dark and Light
Completely blind since birth, Laura would stare for minutes into a close-held flashlight beam, press the heels of her thumbs into her eyes so she could ‘see’ the eruption…
The 58th Street Library
The first block stretched on with big doors and sometimes a doorman standing in front who smiled or touched his hand to his hat and I hurried past to…
In the Small Rotary
where Route 100 meets School Street, two cows graze. I've heard Vermonters lend their cows to neighbors—and to the city, it seems—free food for cows, free mowing for the…