Cold rain stammers on lines of street bricks, worn ideas in rows, stained with tar or blood; read them at your leisure, coffee smoldering in her cup, your sweater bunched at the elbows. Eye shadow left open on the sink. Of tears there is a novel, or dictionary of smudged intentions. Here is a man, there a woman. That’s all the franchise needs to boil. Someone coughs in the night. Match snaps fire, lights a face for a moment. You gave up piano years ago, regrets are fool’s cash. A car door slams. It’s time to leave. Or time for two men to drag you out. Where the trees recline in winter. Dirt garnered, a congregation praying above the dug hole. The only prayer you’ll get or need.…
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Margaret’s friend Joseph visited her regularly in that lonesome hour between supper and bedtime. He always sat across from Margaret on the lounge suite.
“Do you know why I enjoy you coming, Joseph?” she asked him one night, early in their relationship. “It’s because you don’t know anything.”
Joseph raised an eyebrow.
“I mean, you don’t claim to know anything. You never jump in with advice or criticism. You just listen. That’s why I can tell you things.”
“Thank you,” Joseph murmured, with a nod.
Joseph talked quietly and his nodding was thoughtful and sensitive. Margaret knew nothing about his life. He never talked about himself. She didn’t ask where he came from or how he could materialize in her lounge.
She knew she felt safe with him.…
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Here are some thoughts from the Sam’s Club café, where I am enjoying a three-meat pizza and soda combo. I bought them with some loose change. They have, you’ll have to trust me on this, prompted the following line of thinking.
I teach literature, or what’s left of it, and I often make two diametrically opposed rationales for continuing to read literature when no one really seems to care. On the one hand, literature is the last bulwark against consumer capitalism. To read literature from any era keeps our minds alive, resisting the ready-made and reproducible. It brings with it a pleasure wholly outside the immediate gratifications of shiny objects. In other words, literature maintains a contemporary political exigency. It helps us resist the omnipresence of consumerism.…
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There was this smell, acrid, in her hands. Perhaps it was hopeless to look for her brother at the bar last night. But she needed to tell him that their mother had secrets. Did he know? Yet as soon as she got there, she realized she didn’t really know what she wanted to say. It was just anxiety.
“I know what they did, near the laundry room. There was this acrid smell, remember?” She said, hand warming a whisky cup but not really drinking it.
He was busy behind the counter. Ten years separated the two. She had fast breathing when near him. His image made her think of her father, who had left them when they were young. Now there was nobody else.
“I have to work, Marlene.…
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The first time my uncle went to a doctor’s office was for his toe tag fitting. Every night after milking the cows, he rang up to the house for an icy glass of Alka-Seltzer. After he
drank it down, clink-slurp-clink, he declared it “good medicine” and started passing out
the creamy cow feed, rich with molasses and corn bits.
As for my cousin, it really came down to all those casino runs. She was a member of the
Poker Army, blitzing through many a floor in Vegas and even those silly midwest “ships”
that are floating in three feet of water, and therefore aren’t violating any statewide
gambling laws. When her bunker was finally blown at 58, she owed a cool $1.2 mil to
the state.…
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