My father answers the door. “Come in,” he says, like an invitation to a formal dance. “I lead, you follow,” he then commands as we walk across the foyer where slates have been randomly set, like book covers in Storyland. What story am I entering? Will there be witches and goblins, or a barroom brawl? …
We pull into the bus station and my memory chugs in, too. I decide to walk home, know that my mother and father are too drunk to navigate their boat of a car down the town’s melancholy boulevards. I walk by old factories that are behemoths with shattered windows like punched-out eyes. Finally, I come …
A room blooms in memory, in my infernal memory. It leads me to a trip down Tawdry Lane and my consciousness drifts back, in wonder, to a hotel depot where I wait as though I were a nameless figure in a 19th century novel. Snow comes streaming down, howling with the manifest destiny of misery. …
Robert and I are walking and our footfalls are so quiet, we might as well be barefoot. We are walking among a black gallery of trees, which are metamorphic with mystery. The bare, sibilant branches are tuning forks misted by the celestial. We brush hands, pause, brush lips, then bend over rain-tingled twigs cast down …
I am shopping, as shopping is my forte, more so than writing, or so I think. I work the shop I’m in the way a criminal works a crime scene, the way my cousin, Gil, a three times felon, knows how to rob a bank, is behind bars, incarcerated, as I have been incarcerated, will …
My mother is on the sofa, arrayed on the sofa like a wretched lady-in-waiting, she has beached herself on the sofa for years and she is waiting for me, her daughter, to pay her homage, speak in psalms, bless her with my beauty, the very beauty she detests. The heavy curtains, like those in a …
Encountering a Paul Pollaro painting fully takes both moments and years. It causes a brain chill, a tingle down the spine and is a highly tactile experience. I know this because I live with a Paul Pollaro painting and recently made a pilgrimage to where he lives and works near South Berwick, ME so we …
Robert and I are at Cold Spring Park. November has stepped into the dressing rooms of the poor, their cold parlors, cold hearths which are cathedrals for the dispossessed. The sky, hard as a chestnut, is one such cathedral and my lips silently move in prayer to the small god of my misunderstanding. The only …