Robert Louis Stevenson’s sentences first came to me through the air, in my sister’s voice, when I was small and sleepy, and she was reading A Child’s Garden of Verses to me and my smaller brothers—curled in our beds upstairs in the old house, our sister singing the lucid chants of the poems gently, . . .
Read moreThis is so true I involuntarily doodle hearts everywhere I go. I sign my letters compulsively with hearts,
dream of disobedient hearts, work with hearts. I eat them. I boil sauces and the tomatoes on my cutting board form a daisy chain heart. My foot is a pretty ballet slipper, . . .
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is the most important. Everything else is just an excuse for it.
E.g. weather in medium shot that you take extremely
seriously. Cloud above German city, white, covering
the blue, dispersing into formlessness, gossamer
and dissipating like ancient knowledge. . . .
In the morning my eyes look thirsty
like a willow leaning toward
its reflection. My mother waits
inside the circles. One day
I will remember her at her last age
and see her peering from the windows
. . .
If measuring
one’s life as circular
makes sense of movement,
how should we muscle
meaning into days?
As if we end up
where we’ve dreamt,
starlight for eyes
and train static
within the folds
of memory. . . .
You don’t have to believe in the Devil
to end up with him. God’s not so easy.
Say God takes the form of an egret.
Say the Devil also takes the form of an egret.
. . .
The Boquillas Trail is located in a remote corner of Big Bend National Park in Texas. It begins with several long steps sloping gently upward, followed by a number of shorter, steeper steps which veer out of sight to the left. The gravelly sand of each step is held in place by a half-buried log, . . .
Read moreIn February 1943, as a boy just shy of his eighteenth birthday, Charles Fisk wrote home to his parents in Massachusetts: “The work I am doing means nothing to me. That is, I don’t understand what the object of it is. Of course, the principle of the whole thing is secrecy, . . .
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Her grandmother’s shotgun came to Ms. Hicks by way of her brothers, Tommy and Jack. They insisted she take the thing, she was pretty sure, because A) it was the one weapon of the family’s collection they least wanted and B) they were amused at the idea of her having to own it. . . .
Read moreDewy and I were not good sons. At home, we sliced the drapes to make togas and blasted birds with pellet guns we weren’t supposed to have. To make our mother nervous, we pressed our skulls to the microwave door and licked the sticky bottoms of our sneakers. At the grocery store, . . .
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