Who is Poe, Dickinson, Thoreau? I stutter these names on the outside chance that they will fit the Jeopardy clue: This poet won four Pulitzer Prizes. My brother Stu mumbles, “Frost,” and he doesn’t mean the icy stare I give him for knowing the correct answer, once again.
Watching Jeopardy ends a typical family day in Brooklyn—one in which our mother forgets her grandchild’s birthday, my brother suffers a panic attack triggered by his twenty year-old shih tzu’s chronic constipation, and my sister’s car, running on empty, breaks down on the Belt Parkway–her cell phone in the purse that she forgot. However, no matter what the day delivers, at 7 PM my siblings and I gather in my brother’s cluttered living room to watch Jeopardy. Though…
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The feeling was one of relief, not gratitude.
There were the familiar aspects of flight: velocity, height,
measuring distance, and seeing so much, again,
of the world as it should be.
She circled them once, in the clearing,
not as an act of farewell or defiance
but in a final effort to
understand these strange creatures.
Despite the searing pain at the time,
the injured eagle fought them at the start,
then learned in her captivity that
survival would require cooperation.
They had touched her and fixed things.
They had watched her, and even fed her,
and sometimes the touching, though unwelcome,
was strangely reassuring.
And as she flew madly above the green landscape
of summer, she did not circle back again
and could not hear her rescuers cheering
and did not care that they had given her a name.…
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On Monday, July 12th, 1999, at 3:15 pm, Sheriff Elmer Howe thought it curious that a forest green Ford Explorer sat alone in the shade of an oak tree in the student parking lot of East Pocono High School. Students left the lot completely empty in high summer.
The Explorer looked just like the one belonging to psychologist Arthur W. Rohrer, Ph.D., P.C. Arthur was married to Kimberly, which made him Elmer’s son-in-law. Arthur had left Philadelphia years ago to counsel troubled marriages in Scranton, but his office was a good twenty minutes up the highway. How strange.
Elmer pulled his squad car into the lot and parked behind the gymnasium. He looked for summer athletes training in the fields, but there were none. He used his shoulder radio to call the Explorer’s license plate in to Marie at the station.…
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Picture a school of sperm milling around a monstrous egg, an ovarian Mount Everest, one thousand times the size of each swimmer. Their tiny flagella oscillating like oars on a small dinghy, each sperm filled with thoughts and prayers for a blissful genetic future rather than the evolutionary graveyard. It’s a biological version of veteran Manhattan shoppers jamming the front doors of Macys on the morning of Black Friday, except here there is only one winner, only one sperm who actually fertilizes the egg, sustaining their future.
“Soooo, that’s how you were made” Mom said, turning over the last page of “Where Babies Come From” and flipping the softbound book closed. I was six when I asked the question, and Mom was progressive enough to know that a kid should be told the truth when they asked about human reproduction, but sufficiently repressed to hand the task off to a text that was dry as a two-year old package of Tom’s peanut butter cheese crackers from an abandoned vending machine.…
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She has carelessly parked her car, not parallel, but at a slight angle at the side of the highway. She is parked on an incline, where whatever is on the other side, after the peak, is invisible to her; an unknown picture that will only reveal itself once she reaches the crest and starts her descent. It could be a thing of beauty, like when your vehicle is winding through the mountains, going up a steep hill, the car’s hood higher than your line of sight and then, suddenly, your body reaches the crest, and spectacular beauty is laid out before you: crisp silvery snow-capped mountains, a rolling river winding at their feet with shivering birch leaves on trunks of clean, white bark at the river’s edge.…
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When I heard about the government finding non-human biologics, my first thought was whether aliens would find me attractive. I fare pretty well with a specific type of woman, the hipster artsy girl. Often owns a cat or two, regrets none of her tattoos when she should regret them all, and talks way too much about authors whose books I can’t get past chapter two. My type is the blonde cheerleader from movies, often called Stacy, and driving a convertible VW Bug. Unfortunately, I’m the furthest thing there is from who they go for: muscles, a scruffy face, and a cool swagger resulting from a belief they can do anything. My type could be aliens, but I’ll have to wait until Congress approves the release of visual evidence.…
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‘the silence of God is God’
— Carolyn Forché
the sky dons its black cloak
and all its stars wrap about me.
light streams into my eyes
from so far away,
when the birth was first envisioned
on those starry nights of a distant time
that opened all around Them.
i. the idea
struck you,
the only free will,
to have your son begotten,
to give him flesh and blood,
then raise an arm against him
when no angel in heaven would dare to intervene.
hard to imagine the thinking, when the word was God
and he was with God, talking to himself, mumbling
this is suicide, murder —
only to be answered
why hast thou forsaken me?
one would know a human mind,
mercy, love, suffering and affliction,
all that is of the flesh.…
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