#Americans
You know the parlor trick. wrap your arms around your own bod… and from the back it looks like someone is embracing you her hands grasping your shirt
The other day as I was ricochetin… off the blue walls of this room bouncing from typewriter to piano from bookshelf to an envelope lyin… I found myself in the 'L’ section…
I am standing on a disused iron br… that was erected in 1902, according to the iron plaque bolte… the year my mother turned one. Imagine—a mother in her infancy,
Some days I put the people in the… bend their legs at the knees, if they come with that feature, and fix them into the tiny wooden… All afternoon they face one anothe…
There is the sudden silence of the… above a player not moving on the f… and the silence of the orchid. The silence of the falling vase before it strikes the floor,
The murkiness of the local garage… that you cannot make out the calen… drawings on the wall above a bench… Your ears are ringing with the sou… the mechanic hammering on your exh…
As sure as prehistoric fish grew l… and sauntered off the beaches into… working up some irregular verbs fo… first conversation, so three-year-… enter the phase of name-calling.
Today I pass the time reading a favorite haiku, saying the few words over and over… It feels like eating the same small, perfect grape
I wonder how it all got started, t… about seeing your life flash befor… while you drown, as if panic, or t… could startle time into such compr… decades in the vice of your desper…
The neighbors’ dog will not stop b… He is barking the same high, rhyth… that he barks every time they leav… They must switch him on on their w… The neighbors’ dog will not stop b…
What scene would I want to be env… more than this one, an ordinary night at the kitchen t… floral wallpaper pressing in, white cabinets full of glass,
And I start wondering how they ca… If it was congenital, they could b… and I think of the poor mother brooding over her sightless young… Or was it a common accident, all t…
When all of a sudden the city air… the distinguishable flakes blowing sideways, looked like krill fleeing the maw of an advancing wh…
The early sun is so pale and shado… I could be looking up at a ghost in the shape of a window, a tall, rectangular spirit looking down at me in bed,
All afternoon I have been struggling to communicate in Italian with Roberto and Giuseppe, who have begun to resemble the two male characters in my Italian for Beginners, the ones who ar...