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Identity
Daughters Lost
It is difficult to convey the horror of losing your children like this. I found it hard to sleep, to concentrate. Every night I had beautiful dreams in which my children were young and loving, and every morning I woke up to a reality more like a nightmare.
June 1995The Stranger
He continued riding down the hill in front of my house, wobbled a bit, then lost his balance and fell head first over the handlebars onto the asphalt, the bike toppling and twisting behind him.
June 1995Hibernating
It was bear shit, suddenly familiar and evocative. A pile lay steaming on the doorstep of a boarded-up hotel. I felt hot iron in my legs and pretended to fumble for something in my pocket as I crouched in the doorway and inhaled deeply.
June 1995Oleander
Marie loved the sun so much, she got skin cancers from it, which she perversely believed only the sun would help. Doctors periodically scraped or burned the cancerous cells off her face and arms, leaving her to hole up in her trailer for weeks listening to the radio until they healed.
May 1995Everything I Thought Would Happen
In July 1971, my father’s heart exploded, and, faced with a comfortless, parent-snatching universe, I said to my husband, “We need to move out of this city. I’m afraid of becoming one of those assholes who wear aviator sunglasses and scream at cabdrivers.” In fact, I already was one of those assholes and had been for quite some time.
May 1995Hats And Veils
Vadim felt the wind-borne particles of water bursting in the hazy sunlight. He breathed the firs’ musty aroma and remembered Bosnia’s mountain pines above his red-tiled house, and the day Serb soldiers had firebombed the forest and his house had burned in high-explosive flames.
May 1995Drinking The Rain
Then suddenly the dull light in the car began to shine with exceptional lucidity until everything around me was glowing with an indescribable aura, and I saw in the row of motley passengers opposite the miraculous connection of all living beings. Not felt; saw. What began as a desultory thought grew to a vision, large and unifying, in which all the people in the car hurtling downtown together, including myself, like all the people on the planet hurtling together around the sun — our entire living cohort — formed one united family, indissolubly connected by the rare and mysterious accident of life.
May 1995The City
Open-mike for poets, a small toy xylophone, a six-foot submarine sandwich
May 1995My Breasts, Adored
When I was younger I wanted Barbie-doll boobs: lavishly large and perpetually perky. Never mind that her breasts were two cold, lifeless knobs of hard plastic. They looked good.
April 1995Batrender
From my perch twenty yards beneath the cave, I’ve a perfect vantage point to watch the bats emerge at twilight, streaming out of the mouth like musical notes from a horn.
April 1995
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