Excerpts
The Beast Room
The woman unlocked the door and pushed the child ahead of her into the attic room. She held the candle just above the child’s head. "You will sleep here,'' she said. At first in the dim light the child could see only the bed. It was a large bed, like a heap of gray wool …
Three Poems
HATTIE IN GREENWICH VILLAGE Why not sit quietly with them and trailYour smoke across the air as others do?For smoke is beautiful. Why such to-doWith scratching of your match? Your gestures fail,I say, to make your point. Those bred withinThese narrow stairs and crooked streets don't wearWith such éclat what your youth labelled sin.Your leering …
Cimex Lectularius
Whenever I see an exterminator company's vehicle on the street I think what a boon such a service would have been to the set tlers of the Rosebud Country of South Dakota. Mass exterminations were unknown in those days. They were an individual or a family matter, carried out painstakingly by hand. There were no …
Homecoming
He watched the car turn and dip away through a wide stretch of houses that crowded a smudge of far smoke streaming above a slow-fading curve of tall factory chimneys. To the left the downtown heights towered, remote and faint, over the smoke-pennoned river. The city trembled before him like a creation out of his …
The Right Hand
The boy stood tense, holding the post steady and straight in the post hole his father had dug to fill the broken line in the fence. He was a young boy, twelve or so, with light blond hair, like his father's where it had not turned gray, and with eyes the color of smoke, holding …
The Envied Ones
Some years ago, during a discussion of the fine arts among the colored people, a critic said, "I do not pity the Negro writer. I envy him. "I envy him for his background, for the vast and dramatic knowledge into which he is born. I envy him for his heritage of suffering and of close …
The Temples of Learning
Ling Ki came to America for an education. His cousin, on the Hu Road, had an honored friend whose brother dwelt in Canton as a tea merchant, and he knew a man who had gone to America for an education. This man lived near the river, and he dealt in rice. He was not a …
Alicia Ostriker. The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog. University of Pittsburgh Press.
In her new collection The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog, Alicia Suskin Ostriker brings together a trio of voices—each a living thing, each mortal and yet calling out its truths in a clear tenor. These three voices, extraordinary in their ordinariness, build conversations that whirl around each topic. They catch angles of consideration …
Lemonade
Your grandmother is on her deathbed now. She made it a long time ago. Which is to say it was made for her. Which really means she doesn’t want it but she’s going to lie down anyway. You prop her pillows for her, lace her lemonade with Demerol because she is dying and dying hurts …