A Preview of Coming Attractions
I’d hold the strap attached to his ears and mouth, lifting myself onto the leather saddle. One glass eye shone out of the right side of his head; its mouth, once bright-red and smiling, had chipped away to an unpainted put. His nose, too, was bruised, with gashes for nostrils. He had a brown mane...
Suburbs, Summer 1972
My mother starts each day with a cigarette from her Tupperware pouch and the radio tuned to the polka station, where fm means fine music, blaring from the kitchen window sill. Through our back yard, sun gleams off of Mr. Swan’s lifetime collection of Air Streamers, where thirty cats, some neighbors say, roam free. Silver...
Curvature
My big sister grew up unable to dance because of the scoliosis, because of the Milwaukee brace she wore twenty-three hours a day beginning in second grade. So she taught her fingers to dance, fast skinny fingers on piano and trumpet. The living room was her ballroom. The piano by the fireplace obeyed. Celia could...
Cornelia Street
The first time I saw Cornelia was at a dance, at the Cultural Center at No. 3 where folk music was playing and night moths gathered on trumpets as if around a street lamp in the dark. Children knew by heart the precise number of cobblestones in the pavement. And Cornelia had a little metal...
Waiting
Today–my birthday–I have to admit: my body is looking older. A friend says you know you’re fifty when your mother’s hand slides out of your sweater. I brush my hair, but it doesn’t swing heavy like it did just a few years ago. I could handle the color damage by shaving it off to a...
Cigarettes
were like a best friend, one of the most constant things in my whole life, I’m telling Susan, who looks at me with a mixture of kindness, confusion, and outright concern since I seem to be unable to stop talking about cigarettes, about how much I miss them in spite of the pride I feel...
Two Essays
FEVER DREAM My mother in a black two piece bathing suit, chic. My father splashes water, takes a photo—we see her writhe like a cat, a terrible face, the tiger, in agony, a comedy. I never saw this—only in photographs. Suburban barbecue backyard, juniper shrubs with rabbits hidden deep inside as in the magician’s dark...
![](https://brevitymag.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/FFU-013-MFA-Digital-Brevity-200x165-181009-Enders-1B.jpeg")