The Pillory
A replica of a pillory in a replica of a Colonial town. My right arm into the right hole, my left arm into the left. My neck went right through the center. I laughed, not because there was anything remotely funny about being hung up in a cross, but just because it felt good to...
May Showers
Like this, the man says, smoothing a dollop of salve across his wife’s shoulder blades, over the rashes blooming there like teacup roses. With two fingers, he works the cream in circular motions down her rib cage, along the row of black stitches lining the curve of her spine. Look here, he says, and here....
Duck, North Carolina
Once, walking, I found on the sand not a butterflied clam but a small tooth. We have been coming here so long that we can point out where the road used to end, though we differ: some say the fish hut, others the rental shack. Pretty soon there will be a baby, eating great fistfuls...
The Crab in the Stars
I am home alone—sort of. I am almost twelve, and I am unsupervised. My parents have gone shopping. My brother is at a friend’s. It’s just me and my grandparents, who live in an apartment attached to our house. My grandfather is sick. He has been for a year. For a few weeks now he...
At the Nursing Home, My Mother Is Served Traif
The attendant places a plate of sweet potato and ham in front of my mother, who all her life has kept kosher, who has separated the dairy from the meat, the dishes in separate cupboards, the silverware in opposite drawers, all of her life she followed the letter of the law as far as she...
Three Graces
In the Sunflower Café the waitresses sat down in booths with elderly customers and watched them shuffle photos of grandkids like decks of cards, as if looking for a good hand. Some early retirees—robust, tanned, and laughing — described the waitresses to me as “booze hags.” The women’s hands shook as they poured coffee. They...
Blind
A sun lamp, a sleeping pill, my mother dozing without the UV peepers over her eyes. Dark, troubled, shake-of-the-head talk from my father on the phone with the doctor. Mother in her bright blue terry-cloth robe, her face burned blood red and blistered, her eyes blistered too, the wreckage hidden beneath the cotton bandaged to...
Hunting the Moon
Buffalo Park trail curves in a figure eight through a meadow below the San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff, Arizona. In a wet May, spring peepers sing from a little ephemeral wetland. In a generous monsoon summer, Evening Primrose and Sego Lilies lie in the deep grass like fallen stars. In October, grasses have gone gold...
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....
The Poet Visits Her Father-in-Law
Scum on the handle of the refrigerator and a giant greasy handprint on the glass kitchen table. He has turned his cup upside down again and a pool of orange juice coagulates on the clear surface. He uses the same Styrofoam cup every day, never rinses it. Never throws it away. The knife is lying...
I Just Lately Started Buying Wings
Her voice, like some holy place, issues from a warm brown prayer of a face. She’s going blind. She doesn’t worry about her son’s alcoholism anymore, or the injustice of the everyday. “It’s like lye in the sink and you better not put your hands in it,” she says. She’d know. She’s cleaned a lot...
The Visit
We work in silence. I slowly lift one leg, then the other. My mother chooses the more difficult task, and wipes my grandmother’s bottom. I feel shame at my unwillingness to do it. My grandmother’s face is closed to me. She stares into the distance, occasionally wincing at whatever scene is playing in her mind....
Solstice
“Life used to be fun,” my mother says a few days before her eighty-ninth birthday. “Now it’s shit.” It’s hard to argue with her. Her memory is such that she asks me questions and by the time I answer, she’s forgotten what she’s asked. Our conversations take on an Abbot and Costello circularity. Suddenly disagreeable,...
My Mother’s Toenails
As her memory darkened, I did not see my mother. What hold time held upon my mother loosened and, like a shawl, slipped. My father worried that she would walk out the front door in her nightgown, with an empty black purse slung over her arm, into traffic she would not see, having forgotten her...
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