Excerpts
Something to Marvel At
As Beverly and I walked down the sodden creekside trail, sounds of traffic from Interstate 84 behind us became the sound of Latourell Falls ahead of us. The transition was complete when the creek bent east, opening to a sudden view of the falls. We stopped to watch its 250-foot plunge down the north side …
The Snow of Petals on the Fallen World: Some Second Thoughts on Capra
And yet, at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life, After the clement snows have come again, And the American miracle of money, The petals still remain fallen from the rose. What’s been restored is the life once fled from, And while George Bailey’s met his angel, He’s also felt the black wind that lives …
Student Conference
At first, I mistook the small, black tattoo for a phone number or a date jotted in haste on her wrist’s paler underside— then suspected stitches when it didn’t fade. I was not far wrong. (Her poems: careful, deliberate, thin as she was, haunted by a mother years dead—not a word about the brief grief …
The Telephone of the Dead
Marnie Gottfried’s husband, Steve, had been dead for two weeks when he called her for the first time. She had just returned from Israel, hadn’t even unpacked, was as unhinged and raw as she would ever be, and the telephone call sent her windmilling to a therapist. When she mentioned the telephone call to the …
Hilda Raz: A Celebration
I recognize some people as much by their lexicon as any other aspect of their personality. Although there are many words distinct to Hilda, “exquisite” is the word I most closely associate with her. It’s Hilda’s expression of highest approval and the word that best describes Hilda herself. She’s a writer of exquisite poetry, a …
Landscape in the Style of Li Cheng
What if you could breathe into words what happens during the quiet relinquishments of rain in the city, the deepening grays and the hard surfaces ringing? Or that fall when my roommate would come home from the restaurant at midnight and we would go running through the empty streets, then along the river, which was …
Song of the Entomologist
Now, blowflies the size of dimes appear on windows and walls, and carpenter ants eat the house inside out and send out scouts. Soon, earwigs will fall from laundry fresh off the line, and mosquitoes whine in the bedroom all night. Angleworms will tunnel in the dark, and night crawlers, quick and slick as your …
The Sea That Leads to All Seas
A month after her boyfriend Mohamed is deported, Larissa agrees to dinner with the dental student. When you are deported from the United States, you are barred from reentry for ten years. In 2013 Larissa will be thirty-five, the age most doctors cite for increased risks in pregnancy. She has decided on one plan for …
Dirt Angels, by Donald Platt
Plato’s late dialogue Parmenides recounts the tale of the elder scholar questioning young Socrates about his early philosophical ideas. Can only the just, beautiful, and good be the stuff of ideas, Parmenides asks, or do abstractions apply also to the vile and paltry such as hair, mud, and dirt? Socrates responded that surely ideas do …