Wordwrack: Openings
Jewelry, tides, language:things that shine.What is description, after all,but encoded desire? Mark Doty A nor’easter smacked into Cape Ann last night, and this morning the wrack’s dark line lies tangled and heaped. Hundreds of shells have settled sideways and tilted on the beach, half in, half out, sand-dribbled, seaweed-draped, partially rinsed. On the outside, they’re...
Openings
You cannot open the pickles, so you ask your father, who is visiting for the holidays and hunched at the dining room table playing solitaire. Only moments before he announced that he had accomplished the impossible by winning back-to-back hands, the sound of triumph in his voice wafting into the kitchen like a forgotten smell....
Archilochus Colubris, First Sighting
They are so young, so much younger than I am now. My father with his trousers hugging his bottom—it’s 1978, and he’s 25 years old. My mother with her honey-long hair. The little yellow cabin, blackberried, with a small lawn over a scrubby cliff and a scale of beach stairs. The afternoon sun blazes but...
What If?
for D.P. You had the habit of pulling practical jokes on me that pushed the line of decency: shooting bb’s from your upstairs window like a sniper, wrapping my Jeep in industrial strength plastic wrap five inches thick, putting on a Halloween mask and stealthily breaking into my house and then standing over me with...
Women’s Work
in memory of Eva Kellner, whose daughter told me Eva’s story Everything schnell, schnell, my boots for wooden clogs, and Mother refuses to relieve herself in the open bucket sloshing in the corner. Now to the sauna, schnell, schnell, our names rinsed from our bodies until we are all Ruth, our private places checked for hidden diamonds....
Rural Route
Before my uncle raced down the hill from his farm to ours to stop a fire when we weren’t home, before he lifted and threw a barrel of oil out of the burning shed. Yanked the garden hose off the spigot. Before Rural Route 1 became 121st Street, before one farmer warned us about the...
Dusk, I-270
It was dusk and I’d just crossed over into Missouri when he hurdled in front of my truck, a buck, an eight-pointer. I slammed the brakes and he seemed to freeze–not in the headlights, but in my windshield, his big rheumy eyes staring vacantly into mine. Like two drunks on the dance floor we collided,...
Wonder in Africa
After my first visit to Dakar in 1989, I left disoriented. Now I felt reassured to be back. Pulling into the driveway of the hotel that I had once hoped I would never see again, my taxi stopped behind a huge black limousine, out of which poured an entourage of muscular men and fashion model...
![](https://brevitymag.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/FFU-013-MFA-Digital-Brevity-200x165-181009-Enders-1B.jpeg")