Browse Topics

The Smell Of The Vineyards

Luz lived with her mother and sister in the Raisin Capital of the World. In September, when the grapes were drying between the vines, the whole valley smelled of wine.

Other Animals

Amniocentesis, the royal chamber, the head of Horace Greeley

Chinese Dumplings

That first time they came in, he tried to explain to them, “Dumpling big, that lotta dumpling,” but they insisted they knew what they were doing.

Grief And Happiness At The Home

The Home for Refined Ladies was an old, turreted, red-brick building converted from a Catholic girls’ academy which had moved to a newer building in a better part of Dubuque, Iowa, up on the hills overlooking the Mississippi.

Letters From The Road

Greetings from the Laundry Basket, or more accurately THE LAUNDRY B SKET, a laundromat in Austin. The tall and weathered man next to me has been listening to Talk Radio: an anti-pornography Texan made the shrewd point that cigarettes can’t be advertised on TV. Then time ran out.

Red Dawn Over Tweetsie

When I saw “Red Dawn,” I realized that a private and relatively innocent part of my adolescence had become tribalized on a mass scale, and from that fact flowed a palpable undercurrent of menace that had never been there for us.

Distances

Selected Poems

For You

I did my job. I picked her up when her mother threw her away, I handed her over to the shrink when the time came. I did my job. I’m the stepmother, not abnormally wicked.

Love

Before my father died I loved my mother, but now it’s different. I can no longer go to her, put my arms around her, or anything like that. She has become somehow strange to me, and so, not lovable.