The moon’s gaunt and narrow. …………..They say our corridor through life’s …………..measured by the moon. …………..Slim as a tunnel, I tuck my legs under my knees.
Pat scratches licks on the rosewood, …………..strumming them in fragments of silk and nylon. …………..Three-Part Rasguedo, Golpe, …………..Rumbagitana. …………..He plays.
Fire-starting calluses, fireboard, …………..spun Mullein, none of these items …………..are amazed by their use. In the circle dance, …………..my back foot scratches the dust.
Farruca, the wild form, mournful Soleares, …………..the tragic Segurias. …………..He adjusts his segilla, …………..demonstrates Tarrantas y Tarrantino, …………..its dramatic turns and contemplative open rhythm.
Rising into the horizon. …………..I hear the shuffle of leaves in the Sequoia, …………..the rattle of rain upon the green roof.…
Laura liked to think she was honest with herself; it was everyone else she lied to. In the end, what difference would it make? It would only cause everyone to worry and fuss and make a big deal out of it, and she just wanted to live what little life she had in peace. Was that too much to ask?
Actually, if she was honest with herself, she needed to acknowledge that it couldn’t be a secret forever. Questions would start popping up on the lips of busybodies, especially as she started to appear as sickly as she felt. She would cross that bridge when she came to it, though, throwing back her shoulders in the meantime, facing her encroaching doom head-on, albeit alone.…
It was May 14th 1971, my seventeenth birthday. I was stuck in the restaurant kitchen at chi chi Bullocks’ Department store in Sherman Oaks, California, working the early dinner shift for Tuesday’s weekly designer fashion show. It sucked being young and poor, but restaurant work was a good source of rent and provided meals every shift; two blessings for an only child in the recession of the 70’s living with a single, bipolar mom.
I reached up, tore the sole remaining ticket off the stainless steel order wheel, and popped two slices of cheese bread into the toaster for what I hoped would be the final order of the afternoon: one of our specialty bacon, avocado, and tomato sandwiches. I paused for a deep breath, as I tried to strip the day’s work and my mother’s morning’s antics from my brain, then grinned as I thought of tonight’s birthday rendezvous with my girlfriend Jen.…
Today, Aloysius O’Leary picked the wrong pocket. From the tippy-top of the Ferris wheel at the St. Louis World’s Fair, he watched blue-coated coppers weave around fairgoers at the crossroads of Skinker and Ceylon.
With over fifteen-hundred structures and tens of thousands of people, he thought they’d never nab him or his accomplice. No problems all week, but if separated, they’d meet at the Ferris wheel.
Not only could Gertrude pick pockets, but she could steal pearls from a woman’s neck and stickpins from a man’s tie. She was also a wisenheimer, selfish, plain-looking, too tall, but gosh dang-it, he was falling for the dame.
His mishap had occurred on the Pike. The man in a frock coat and silk hat looked like he ate diamonds and shat twenty-four-karat gold-nuggets.…
I lived with a singer once, a number of years ago in that distant valley called youth. She had been the singer for a group called The Savage Blusterbox, and you can get the idea of the sort of music they made from that name. I was the roadie. I had no musical talent. I have no musical talent. Or even much interest. The band’s leader, Jorge, probably thought I took an interest in his music, if not music in general. This was one of many demonstrations of Jorge’s denseness. His stage name was Duneman. He told me it was based on some novel. I don’t know. I’d never heard of the book, and I’m not a big reader. Magazines, a biography now and then. Novels, not really.…
It was the morning glory wreathed around the jersey’s horns that turned you into a vegetarian. The beast stood there in the green pasture like some bovine Ophelia, brown, beautiful and tragic, trailing white flowers, green hearts. How could I ever eat you? you murmured and made a pact with the future never to do so.
I, with my eyes on the traffic lights, missed the scene and the promise, being concerned with the more immediate future by depressing the throttle and heading down the road.
In any case, my convolvulus was not morning glory, but bindweed, not beautiful, being a depressing throttle of a vine itself: smothering, persisting, insisting on its own survival at the expense of everything else. Rather like ourselves, I guess. Which is why I hated it so much, battled with it with a fury, pointlessly ripping its hateful fecundity from the currant bushes, scrabbling, tearing the fleshy spaghetti of its white roots from the reluctant soil only pausing from time to time to dream of sirloin.…
It’s not often that a writer is equally adept at poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and literary criticism, yet Lee Upton has been an exception to the rule for over a decade. Unsurprisingly, her latest novel—Wrongful—only cements that fact, as it’s a thoroughly stirring and imaginative but realistic mystery/character study (in the self-aware vein of Agatha Christie) that exemplifies her many talents.
Per the official synopsis:
When the famous novelist Mira Wallacz goes missing at the festival devoted to celebrating her work, the attendees assume the worst—and some hope for the worst. Ten years after the festival, Geneva Finch, an ideal reader, sets out to discover the truth about what happened to Mira Wallacz. A twisty literary mystery dealing with duplicity, envy, betrayal, and love between an entertainment agent and a self-deprecating former priest, Wrongful explores the many ways we can get everything wrong, time and again, even after we’re certain we discovered the truth.
