Excerpts
Time in the Sierras Subbéticas
All week a caretaker started hacking the hillside with his weed whacker at dawn. Its fierce buzz drove us, bleary with olive pollen and summer heat, out to walk through groves and whitewashed village homes as the sun rose. On the foothills road we stepped aside for a baker’s pickup, its load of fresh loaves …
stop-&-frisk
-&-what- does-it-take- to-cooperate- -shrink- into-an-apology -turn-over- your-body -turn-out- your-pockets -be-a-right-answer- to-questions -they-choose -be- chosen
Husband Fair
for Matthew, darling How good to lay with my husband in our stone flat with not enough windows and many doors. We need another chair. The smaller table wobbles too much for books and won’t hold both of our plates. But we eat, he and I, and the fare is good. I do the …
Horror Story
My niece’s classmate kept a pet snake coiled next to her in bed. One night, the girl found the snake stretched out straight along her side. She thought it was sick and took it to a vet who said, “It’s not ill. It’s trying to measure when it’s long enough to …
Wrong Number
The phone rings, and it’s a woman with her backbone up because she knows—don’t think she doesn’t—that I was with her man last night. Better keep myself distant from him, she warns, better stay away from her Buzzard, or else she’ll be forced to put the hurt on me, swear to God, just see if …
Fight, Bull
A friend of mine, a longhaired, bearded carpenter, told me a story about a time he boarded a city bus in Fresno, California, and nearly resorted to violence —the kind of violence they write stories about in the daily paper. Your memory isn’t even working normally. It could happen to you or to me. It …
Adrienne Rich. Last Poems: Selected and New, 1971-2012. W. W. Norton.
In her poem “Delta” Adrienne Rich writes, “If you think you can grasp me, think again: / my story flows in more than one direction / a delta springing from the riverbed / with its five fingers spread.” I have always noted those lines as both a warning and an invitation. Her final book, Later …
How to Own a Building
Winner of the 2012 Prairie Schooner Summer Creative Nonfiction Essay Contest, selected by Judge Steven Church (Runners-up: Kirby Wright, “Ladder of Glass,” and Garrett J. Brown, “Galileo in the Uecker Seats”) [New York City] For years, people saw only the ugly rectangular shapes, like two steel pillars hoisting the sky. Too tall, uninventive. Architecture should …
Urine on the Evening News
Of course It stinks Why do you think They always advertise Clorox & Tide & Ivory Snow & Joy & Cosmic Drain Cleaner & Vacation Cruises & IVs On even more channels If they didn’t You’d have to smell the wars You don’t believe in anyway Or listen to that endless hypnotic voice fill The …