Everyone lived by thinking about flight. —Herta Müller In Milan a man imagines the devil. It is 1452, perhaps earlier. The Americas are only a merchant’s dream. The man holds a brush and a palette of egg yolk and dried red pigment. The duke is paying him to paint the Devil and the Tower and …
“I want to see some history.” -The Sex Pistols, “Holiday in the Sun” (1977) In January 1977, I move from Los Angeles to a fancy, old-fashioned London hotel suite, where I live with my mother and little brother for two months, long enough that we run out of money. We leave the city in March, …
A painting of the Virgin hangs at the foot of my bed. She wears her sacré coeur like a brooch, fastened with a sword through her chest. Mary’s sacred heart is crowned with flowers, just as gravestones are. I wish I were capable of such vulnerability; a provocateur, a coquette, a fetishist. She’s the foremost …
And like this my mother can stand, lost in thought over the slightest movement, a mere moment, five seconds, an old newspaper by the side of the road that lifts with the wind of a passing car, comes to rest again once it’s gone; the first potato that sprouts in the cellar and can soon …
(Between South Second Street and the Whitewater Gorge) I make my way along the old railbed where the train used to run on the eastern edge of the Whitewater Gorge. The train rolls through town on a different track now, but on quiet nights, or when the wind is blowing in the right direction, its …
When I am thinking about leaving my husband, my friend reminds me of that poem we both like where you sit and watch the boats on the horizon, which are all the lives you might have lived. When I am trying to decide what I want, out of the realm of what’s possible, I watch …
He’s waiting in the red Colt to pick up Rachel from her teaching job. She’s good with the seventh graders, the bright ones sprinting toward Ohio State, the ones who will drop out in a few years, the ones who will be pregnant soon, the ones who will die early in knife brawls or absurd …
He kept the things that were best. Things blue, and white, and the colors of skin in Caracas, Buenos Aires, Toronto, Cincinnati, San Francisco. He kept them poorly; he threw away the translucent box cover for the book on the body I’d given him, the one so dear I returned to the shop’s shelves my …
My wife, LauraBeth, and I bought our first house in 2006, in the New Jersey suburbs. I was twenty-four and she was twenty-three. We had money for a down payment because her mother had died and left behind some insurance money. We purchased the house for $175,000, at what I later learned was an obscene …
They gaggle into the pool hall trailing black feathers every Saturday after work, not really girls but women. But I am so old, women that young are still girls and my twenty-two-year-old coworker is Son, can you get me the broom. Don’t “Son” me! Javier says. What do I know? They arrive, the five of …