1.
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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Morning in the mountains. I am going down home
early. The road empty, wide, smooth as my hand.
Sun streams heavy bays of light. If I could remember one
use of beauty, the persistent type, on whole unhuman,
so much more space made for possible peace. . . .
In our green Plymouth station wagon, we crisscrossed the map. My mother let me choose our destinations. “Any state but Georgia” was Eve’s rule, though I still memorized the Georgia motto: Wisdom, Justice, Moderation.
Her other rule: we couldn’t stay more than a month in any place. . . .
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So you will never find me—
In this life—with a sharp and invisible
Fence, I encircle myself
With honeysuckle, bind myself,
With hoarfrost, cover myself.
So you will never hear me
At night—with a crone’s subtlety:
With reticence—I fortify myself. . . .
We do not recognize the body
Of Emmett Till. We do not know
The boy’s name nor the sound
Of his mother wailing. We have
Never heard a mother wailing.
We do not know the history
Of ourselves in this nation. . . .
Enter the Valley of Knowledge,
with its boundless myriad roads
unfurling in every direction.
Here, no path resembles the next.
Here, the traveler of the body is different
from the traveler of the soul. . . .
If the Pyramid at Giza were
at Bleecker and LaGuardia,
the base would extend down to West Broadway
and Spring, and across Spring to Mercer,
and up Mercer to Bleecker and across
Bleecker to LaGuardia,
sloping up on four sides
to its peak the height of the skyscraper
on Spring and Varick. . . .
The room in which I start sobbing again and wonder
if my sobs will hurt the baby inside me, and the room
in which I hope so, a room made entirely of a window.
The room of my husband’s goodnight,
which is a room in a large municipal building with Styrofoam ceilings
where lines must be formed so forms can be signed, . . .
Boone’s genius was to recognize the difficulty as neither material nor political but one purely moral and aesthetic.
—William Carlos Williams,
“The Discovery of Kentucky”
Narrator is unmanageable. Demonstrates a disregard for form bordering on the paranoid. Questioned closely, he declares himself the open enemy of conventional narrative categories. . . .
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