I'm Writing and I Can't Shut Up
It is said that until 1950 every Italian could recite by heart twenty-five lines of Dante, … Uh oh, she’s doing poetry again…. Yes, but this poem is more of a story. And, as poems do, it layers meanings on top of one another so they are both themselves and part of a whole. The […]
The coldest Christmas Eve on record and it was hands down my biggest order ever. I’d been driving for almost a year since The Daily Witness fired me. I used to be a features writer. And married. Now I was a newly separated Uber Man. It’s a rule right up there with Chekhov’s Gun: If […]
Serial miscarriers, especially those over forty, become accustomed to grieving in isolation. Two or three losses elicit sympathy and compassion. After the first, friends and therapists suggest that you plant a tree or have a ceremony to commemorate the embryo you lost. After the third, no one mentions trees or ceremonies. You are met by […]
Inevitably I’m asked, “Why devote a paper, much less an entire dissertation, to Plutowsky?” I have a two-part answer, the first of which is my personal connection to Plutowsky via his great niece, my fiancée, Loretta. Professionally I have this response: Plutowsky is one of hundreds of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American authors—indeed, one of tens […]
You pick up the large, heavy volume that is Pushcart L: 2026 and flip through some of the first pieces, scanning to see what’s in store this year. You see the first story is set in 1999. A few poems, something about a god, about salmon. Then you come to this: You are Casey Malloy. […]
LIKE MOWING THE GRASS The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows. —Robert Frost, “Mowing” Fed up with my angel-ridden, Latinate dirges, my sophomore poetry professor kept telling me to write about something more ordinary and at hand, like mowing the grass. Instead of elegies for my mother who’d died suddenly a few months […]
He had married Inimfom eight years ago for her faith in him, for how readily she’d gone to the places he had envisioned. Before they were married, she would sit in his congregation, week after week, and when he shared his prophecies for the future of his ministry, her hallelujahs were the loudest. He had […]
Desperate times call for desperate measures. Guy Fawkes said that, and so did Esmerelda, Gustavo’s daughter, when I went to visit him at the hospital. Gustavo is my landlord of seven years, owner of the place I landed once the scripts went un-optioned and the residuals dried up, an eight bungalow court on the fringe […]
I’ve always loved salmon. Not to eat, as I don’t eat fish, but I’ve always loved salmon in general because salmon jump and no one knows why. They jump all over the place—out of rivers, up waterfalls. Some say they jump to clean their gills. Others say they jump for joy, because they love the […]
Golgori was our god, and for as long as we could recall, we had been under his dominion. He was a proud god, a commanding god, and for millennia, we had lived each day under his guiding word. As we woke, he would write us his instructions into the sky above, and we would rise […]