Life begins by turning around itself.The supple tenor of snailshell whorls depends: Life also ends by turning around itself.The Garden Snail wears its home around its slimy body. Lips of worshippers wearaway the sculpted straps of the saint’s bronze shoe. Wherever they journey, peregrine Garden Snails are everlastingly at home. Attunementtransits from beauty’s form to …
Passing travelers, having searched for a dinner with local character, end up at Red Lobster.They know this isn’t Boston, Chicago, or LA, but couldn’t there be a diner, pizzeria, or caféthat exudes terroir, even dilute, even abject? Most locations aspire only to be the objectsof prepositions. North of which. From which. Out of which. Beyond …
On this day, during some tough year, I was born from simple soil.Red clay. Ocher dust. No forefather. Only my overworked mother named me.I was found in a basket of wild grasses. My vine and tuber secretive, curling.I, this yam, wish to remain whole. I, severed root.Find me, this severed root, waiting not for hand …
Yvette told Lora about the job at the symphony’s end-of-season party at the lake. There were burgers and beers, and the sun was bright, catching sharp flashes off the water. But nothing could stop the day from feeling like a funeral: Twelve cellists cut down to eight, eight bassists to six, four bassoonists to two. …
Merk Greco most of the year was a one-man operation. As Mercury’s Extermination he drove his cranberry Ford F-250 up and down St. Louis, scheduling termite jobs north and south (not west where the snobs lived, not east where it was Illinois). But when the weather got hot, the calendar full, he’d recruit an assistant …
For six hours a day, he watched the couple spin. At first, he despised them. It was emptiness for emptiness’s sake. A piece that exemplified all the worst impulses of contemporary art, the things that made people snicker and roll their eyes while they passed through the museum. Now, after so many hours alone with …
Listen to Brandon read “The Route”: The Route As Nasim waited at the café for Marlin, he avoided thoughts of consequence. He’d come here straight from the cardiologist. Today she’d said the words “blood pressure” with new gravitas, her voice low and urgent. Now he reviewed the menu’s salads. House, Greek, Caesar, Cobb. On his …
“Tom fell from the sky,” Cecilia says when someone asks how they met. “At our age, when so much was settled, imagine that,” she adds. Both of them long divorced, their lives filled with visits and weekly phone calls with children and grandchildren, with daily, weekly, monthly routines. The refrigerators at both their houses papered …
Today, Cheryl is five: The number is startling, a near impossibility. Last night, roosting in her nest of unraveled mittens, in the stone alcove under the metro’s vaulted ceiling, Cheryl had considered her age with pride. Five! Most urban-dwelling pigeons didn’t live past the tender age of two. Both her parents had died when she …
I dropped into my father’s casketa faded photoin which he stood on a beach, ankle deepin an ocean wave, lifting a child.He swung me high into morning.My bucket hat flew from my head,landing in a moat circling a fortressmolded from sand and store-boughtconch shells.His powdered face at restless beautiful than his surprisewhen milk for our …