The second wave of the virus came and went. Ben caught it again and died before signing the divorce papers or changing his will. He’d refused to sign. He’d called her at least once a week the first month, begging her to give him another chance. “I’ll change,” he said. “Just tell me how you want me to change. I don’t understand what you want.”
Do reminiscence and nostalgia fool us? I rue the days I once vowed to remember. They’re unwanted memories now. A mine sweeper? I need a mind sweeper. Why? Well, in my family the men came home at night.
when my cheek and sweat
cool against your marbled cliff.
A band of quartz
runs beneath my body,
and colors the scarp and jag.
A huge bright spot, smack-dab in the middle of my left temporal lobe, was impossible to miss. A small speck glimmered on my motor cortex. Some gray spots didn’t light up—those were the old ones. Yeah, I remember you.
I take a new, perverse pride as you
once did, swaggering back to school
from your grandmother's kitchen,
lemon tiles studded with plates,
coeur de boeuf tomatoes coloring your face.
This visit will be defined by pink
handlebar streamers,
a glittery bike
helmet, and a white plastic basket made
to look like wicker.
tempestuous youth. Incorrigible
headstrong yet I softened only
for you
you, quiet menace
Later, Lola doesn't mind when the Dog Warden moves the scanner slowly from side to side across her back to her tail, down the sides of her legs and under her neck, where it finds the chip. He calls the listed telephone number, but there's no reply.
next thing i know i’m looking
for my coat in a bar
all my friends are gone and
i don’t know why i’m here in the
first place.
Jawbreaker ultimately distinguishes itself through its specific treatment of high school politics, especially through its wicked screenplay, slick visuals, and lurid narrative. Even the name of the school, Reagan High, evokes a political atmosphere in which, as I mentioned, Foucault’s structures of power apply themselves to angsty, late ‘90s adolescence.
But as we grow closer (and I grow more reliant on our relationship), her solutions—if they can still be called that—turn increasingly… unconventional. There’s the anewifier session, then the silence pills. This weekend, it’s the screaming retreat.
Gordo passes me the dart. I take a few long drags. My heart never twinges for the Wolfes, but it sure stings on account of people who do me wrong. Like Ma and Sheila and more men than I care to count. Seems I reckon I don’t deserve to be loved.
He put the sunglasses on so they were propped over his forehead, just a few inches from her own. Only her purse separated them. His eyes were a sort of olive green; they seemed to her kind, thoughtful, beautiful. She fought herself blinking; the tingling at the bottoms of her feet had intensified, and she felt color rising into her cheeks.
For me to rate my present pain would require me to separate what I experience now from what I have experienced before. It’s not that I can’t do it. It’s just that it isn’t as simple as it seems.
How much pain on a scale of 1-10? Questions are raised.
There's a firmness, a near violence, with which you chop vegetables, at odds
with your nature, but maybe I'm deluding myself. Is that my head on the
block and are you a modern day Madame Defarge transmitting
secret signals to forces out to usurp me?
Wandering around Maplewood Village,
past the ice cream shop
where over forty years ago we wore
pink uniforms and developed scooping forearms,
you ask me if
I will ever settle down.
I taught high school and was off for Patriots Day, a Massachusetts state holiday which commemorated the battles of Lexington and Concord and the birth of the nation. Most Bostonians thought the day off was to observe the running of the Boston Marathon and to attend an 11 am Red Sox home game. Which, I suppose it had become. But this, this changed everything.
brutal morning will not answer itself:
hard green lemons
a casket of carnations
misfortune and her tease
my seed once nestled in utero
Once we ran out of gas. You tested fate and me. What equation
comprised of reconciliation yields tensile? I went for a run.
We spoke on the phone for hours, but distance still compiled day after day.
I was unfaithful — launching betrayal like a missile. I went for a run.
Each evening after settling in bed, I glance at Zweig’s book and am reminded of my beloved grandmother. I reflect upon her difficult beginnings being orphaned at the age of eleven, and her subsequent immigrations. I think about how I credit her with my passions for writing and reading, after all, it was on her typewriter, where at the age of six, my first story emerged.