Roy Lichtenstein. Credit: Bill Ray. Printed with permission – billraypix/Marlys Ray, 6/2022
The picture above is a photograph (captured by photographer Bill Ray) of the artist Roy Lichtenstein sitting amongst four of his paintings at a New York art gallery. It is hanging in my second-floor hallway, just to the right of the upstairs port of my chair lift. I face it when I depart the lift, and since I stand up slowly, I have time to appreciate its complexity.
Please focus on the picture in the upper right corner where the anonymous woman says: IT’S -IT’S NOT AN ENGAGEMENT RING. IS IT?
They are a handsome couple in a conventional sense. Dressed well and expensively, especially in view of the double-stranded pearl necklace Betsy is wearing.…
I very much dislike being at a buffet – Mary Ruefle
I stand in the stairwell say to him that he and I aren’t going to work out, him being a cowboy, aspiring cop. He marries a librarian. I go on to psychedelics, sit-ins, join a cult,
marry and move to a place he would’ve hated. My mother tells me, twenty years in, she’s heard he still has my picture on his mantle. You never lose the first he-was-everything-to-me.
I’ve googled him over the years, imagined how a call might go, nearly did one summer.
The sunlight explores the walls of the apartment we share like a rabid cockroach. I crack the body with a firm stomp, one foot— shoeless. Together, the dog I call the love of my life, and I hold a small service.
The dog has a few nice things to say. I cry for the third time today. The body lays in a planter on the fire escape, three inches down in the dirt, where a month later grows a peony, your favorite flower, clearly in love with the light.
When her parents fought, and Melissa had blunted all her colors to stubs, she would crank open the window and take herself off the trailer park, unseen. The oppressive Tennessee summer often baked the inhabitants of her two-bedroomed, ten-by-twenty-eight-foot home; and she understood from a young age that heat, combined with all-day drinking, made both grown-ups so dehydrated they were delirious even in their raving.
The first time she’d thought of this solution, she’d been nine years old and tall for her age; a peculiar child prone to fits of imagination. But who could blame her? For until then she’d known only the closet, candy pink pajamas, and Push-Pops for tea. The very shadows on the wall came alive to keep her company; they danced just for her.…
Christmas 1990, my dad bought me a Nintendo. My dad, who was freshly divorced from my mom, was down in Florida visiting. We had just moved from Chicago six months before. I was five at the time, so of course I didn’t understand how much my mom disliked that he was there. My theory is that he showed up uninvited but was allowed to stay when my mom saw how excited her children were to see him.
Even though by 1990, the Nintendo had been out in the US for five years, my siblings and I marveled at the video game console like it was a brand-new invention. It was a gift from my dad, a person that we had moved away from, and that I suddenly wasn’t allowed to see any more for reasons I didn’t understand, so I coveted it like it was plated in gold.…
The leaky ceiling at the restaurant was nicknamed the fountain by the staff, and when the owner overheard them he called it brilliant. He put seats around the bucket and declared it a contemplative experience.
Here’s the thing, he said. Water and air are the simplest elements in our universe. You yourself are 80% water and 10% air. That is why, as you watch the waterfall through the air, you can contemplate yourself and reality at a deeper level than you ever could before.
The entire staff thought he was crazy until people paid double to sit in the contemplation circle. Only one girl piped up and still called it a leak, but he fired her and threatened to sue her into the ground.
