Hands, by Siv Cedering (1939-) I When I fall asleep my hands leave me. They pick up pens and draw creatures with five feathers on each wing. The creatures multiply. They say: “We are large like your father’s hands.” They say: “We have your mother’s knuckles.” I speak to them: “If you are hands, why […]
7th Game: 1960 Series, by Paul Blackburn (1926-1971) Nice day, sweet October afternoon Men walk the sun-shot avenues, Second, Third, eyes intent elsewhere ears communing with transistors in shirt pockets Bars are full, quiet, discussion during commercials only Pirates […]
To Persuade a Lady Carpe Diem, by Michael Benedikt (1935-2007) True, I have always been happy that all the things that are inside the body are inside the body, and that all things outside the body, are out I’m glad to find my lungs on the inside of my chest, for example; if they were outside, […]
The Diving Apprentices, by Christopher Middleton (1926-) Sometimes you watch them going out to sea On such a day as this, in the worst of weathers, Their boat holding ten or a dozen of them, In black rubber suits crouched around the engine housing, Tanks of air, straps and hoses, and for their feet Enormous […]
Woman at the Window, by Theodore Deppe (1950-) Like a woman in Vermeer, she ironed by the kitchen window, blue towel turbaned about wet hair, three-quarters of her face suffused in sun. From the cellar doorway I called to her, unwilling to descend those nightmare stairs alone, unable to compel her to join me. Mother […]
Movie Queens, by Geraldine Connolly (1947-) The sisters cut them from empty backdrops, propped them one atop a horse in a riding suit, one at lunch on a cruise ship skimming a bay in California. Clusters of dolls leaned against cement blocks, a garden of pale faces above shimmering lilts of cloth and color, foxfur […]
You can keep afternoon and its dwindling mysteries, twilight with its seedy hauteur. You can have night with its phony neon and rented motel rooms. I prefer morning when the air is so quiet the rub of a cricket’s leg sounds like wildness beckoning. My feet pad along the carpet like bears’ paws along a […]
Lydia, by Geraldine Connoly (1947-) There was life before us my sister and I discovered looking at photographs we shouldn’t have been looking at of the English girl my father was engaged to during the war. Here she is right in front of our eyes, the woman before my mother, in a black lace cocktail […]
The Entropy of Pleasure, by Geraldine Connolly (1947-) By the time you walk up to the ocean the wave has already disappeared, replaced by another wave, another sadness as in passion or the light dying at dusk or the shell split under your foot, another scar made in the sand. You can’t remember exactly what […]
First Love, by Mary Dorcey (1950-) You were tall and beautiful. You wore your long brown hair wound about your head, your neck stood clear and full as the stem of a vase. You held my hand in yours and we walked slowly, talking of small familiar happenings and of the lost secrets of your […]