Last night she looked me in the eye and told me she’d do anything I wanted, go anywhere I wanted. Before sunrise she tried to stab herself in the belly with a little knife. Not the sharpest knife in the place – but still. I had to hold her down for a while.
“Honeybee, we can’t keep doing this,” I say. “We have to stop.”
We are sitting on the floor at the miniature table in Charlie’s room. We are too big for the white chairs. We don’t want to break them, even now. You might not think we’d be in that room, but it is the most comfortable place to sit. It has the softest carpet, anyway.
“We’re no good, babe,” she says. “I feel like we should just die.”…
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We went out at midnight to see the sun touch the horizon.
There was so much meaning attached to a simple act of angular geography.
It hung there, suspended, like breath before a wish arranges itself
And the world went white and the water and the air and we closed
our eyes for the blackness
And when we opened it was light again,
just like we always knew it would be.
– Emily Shearer
Author’s Note: My teenage son went to Iceland last year with a school group; his stories of the midnight sun inspired this poem. With it, I wanted to capture the optimism of youth.…
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People never come here knowing. They just see the little town when they stay out at Mickey’s. They walk out on the beach there and that’s when they see it. When they peer just around the bay and see a few houses in the lips of the next cove. But they don’t get it. They trickle through lemon trees on the edges of the town as if it were some open bazaar, buying little pieces of us as they walk by. Stare right at us with quarters for eyelids. Blinking, staring, picking us up off the shelves, stuffing houses and children and the warm rose succulents right under their eyelids. They drag the whole town through the dirt by the knots in their shoe laces.
And then they walk into that market and don’t pay any attention to the jagged lines in the old yellow paint, don’t even notice the threshold of sucker plants potted on each side of the door, swelling when they walk by.…
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I eat the same lunch
and sit in the same seats,
I smile at strangers,
or I keep my head down.
I am not a good man,
I am not bad.
I am filling a space;
a ticket number in
the deli line,
the middle child,
a third wheel,
a well-timed joke
in a class of strangers.
I sleep alone,
cry alone,
drink water most of
the time,
set my clocks three
minutes fast so that
I am never late.
I don’t like my first name,
I don’t like god,
I am afraid of needles
going through my
pale skin.
I have four cavities,
two shelves of books,
one shelf of movies.
I believe in art and in
the sound of my own
voice.
And I love you,
most of all.…
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No, you can’t move mountains,
and your pounding fists won’t budge them an inch,
but your very presence creates a tidal force,
though no ocean waves will break over those high rocks.
Don’t be flattered, any mass in this universe will do,
for the mathematics that covers your gravity
covers all other gravities just as heavily.
True, mountains remain rigid
and their peaks will never bow before you
yet there is within them
the slightest tension to draw closer.
And this same tension arises
in the earth beneath and the planets and stars above.
No human-made seismograph
can measure the nanodynes of attraction,
but some divine register surely is recording
how all existence is somehow compelled
to gather by your side.
– Richard Fein…
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It’s twilight, and you’re walking with a dog. Your dog. Perhaps the dog, the combination of all the dogs you’ve loved in your life: the golden retriever who destroyed your Barbie dolls when you were a child, the wild wire-haired terrier you adopted as soon as you graduated from college, the beagle you got after your divorce.
The dog runs free, loping ahead of you, returning without hesitation when you call. This is the kind of park that allows dogs to run free, making easy circles under the trees.
It’s twilight, and it’s one of the shoulder seasons, perhaps early fall or perhaps late spring. The air is warm, humid enough to feel soft. Somewhere there’s the scent of flowers. Somewhere there’s a hint of music.…
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Finkelstein put his hand on Jerry’s shoulder.
“That’s all I can tell you.”
Jerry could barely button the buttons on his shirt. His fingers felt like hot dogs and the buttons felt as small as tic tacs. He had come to trust the doctor and had begun to believe he could maybe fix it. Finkelstein snapped the metal clipboard closed and looked at him with big, sad eyes. He hated this part. He always hated this part.
“I’m sorry, Jerry.”
Jerry bumped into the wall on his way out of the examination room and two nurses saw it. He looked at them sheepishly, then realized that embarrassment, along with a whole host of other things, was something he wouldn’t be bothered with much longer.
What was it, anyway? …
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