Articles

A wailing begins at the registration window, a high-pitched adult voice, male, the elemental timbre an unmistakable keening of fear and pain. Even before I see him, I think of the purity of a baby’s cry and, also, that it is unfair to compare a man to a baby. I think too how rare it …

I had hoped that I could make art after having a baby but now understand the temporary impossibility of this goal. My eight-month-old son Mauricio lies before me in his crib, finally sleeping following the “fade” method, a questionable aid. The scent of milk perfumes my life. My mind fills with visions of his infinitesimal …

I accept the position in spring. When they call, they tell me I was the unanimous vote. It was you or no one, the department chair says. And no one didn’t want the position, she adds, and laughs. Okay, I say, then sign the papers, graduate with my doctorate, move across the country. Okay, I …

I. It could be snow, the way it floats, or ash from ancient volcanoes awake and exploding. But instead it’s seeds wrapped in something like down, released by the thousands from cottonwood trees. If they land near water they grow but mostly they don’t. The sun starts to set and the air turns the color …

. . . Pete Best was going to be a teacher before Paul McCartney persuaded him to join the band’s Hamburg tour. There they played four shows a day, seven nights a week. Between sets they slept next to the toilets behind the cinema screen of the Bambi Kino theater. When the Beatles returned to …

Sundays when I was a small boy, my paternal grandmother watched the faith healer Oral Roberts on our Philco television. She was almost eighty years old at the time and nearly blind with cataracts. I watched with her because I was fascinated with television. An only child, I learned to entertain myself. I loved the …

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Groping for underwear in my top drawer my fingers brush the velvet bag I shoved far in the back, not knowing where to store spent casings from the guns that fired above my mother’s casket. That was a month ago. Today—deep breath—I spill them in my hand, these hollow fossils from that blast of woe …

The First of Them The first of the études always reminds her of a day when she was thirteen, though there’s no reason to remember this one day over so many others like it, while things were still good and summer meant beautiful blue skies with her parents lazing on chaise longues near the docks, …

Susan B. Anthony had hair as black as soot, skin as white as snow. Susan B. Anthony had a red, red cape that she loved to pieces and refashioned into a banner. Wicked stepmothers tried and failed to force her to go to the ball, marry sensibly, to be the stepmother of the dreaming daughters …