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Sunbeams

If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each person’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Lullaby

My Life As Giselle

Giselle didn’t get up and leave when people started talking about the war. She stayed in the conversation, switched to waving her hands in front of other people’s faces instead of her own. When she listened in on the next table, she leaned over and said Pardonnez-moi before offering a pithy rejoinder to something she’d overheard. These talks were possible because people all around her were thinking, she was thinking, it was understood that everyone was thinking, that everyone should think.

To Invent Fire

I am much too concerned with the actual earth and what walks on it to spend my small time here seeking to define such abstractions as capitalism and socialism, and broader still, society and country.

Sunbeams

“You seem to be reacting to your boyfriend as if he were your father,” your shrink may say stonily (unless she is a strict Freudian, in which case she’ll shut up and wait until you think of it yourself, a process that usually takes ten years. This is why strict Freudians have such lovely summer houses.).

Cynthia Heimel

Lipstick

Cherries In The Snow, Plush Purple, Orange Flip

Hard Bargain

Two head masks from West Africa, / helmets of rough wood, / hang on my study wall.

Bugs In A Bowl

This Body

My daughters want to know why I’ve started working out at the Y. I want bigger muscles, I tell them. I want to be stronger. They think this is hilarious: a forty-six-year-old man acting like he’s sixteen.

Guess Who This Is

Guess who this is. I won’t keep you in suspense. I am that tall dark and handsome ha ha jewelry salesman who got on your bus in Harrisburg PA last Tuesday. The one who asked is the seat next to you taken?