Posts tagged "imagery"

Suspended

The locker room walls were painted puke green and lined like a cage with metal hooks, and red mesh equipment bags hung from the hooks like meat. One of the bags was swinging, and I was swinging in it, and Drew McKinnick slapped at it and did his punching, and the janitor got me down....

Hill Street Blues

My first memory fails me.  Brown shag carpet.  I am in the living room.  My mother is watching the end of Hill Street Blues on a color television.  She lights a cigarette.  Smoke rises, spiraling toward the ceiling.  When her show is over, an orange racecar with a Confederate flag painted over the top jumps...

Tenderness

Ronnie Thomley banged on our door early one morning. He runs heavy machinery for Willie Thrift, the pond man. He showed up at our place in the pine woods of panhandle Florida driving a compact air-conditioned tractor equipped with a front-loaded rotary cutter.  Ronnie’s boss had sent him over to clear out some of the...

Using the Fate of Insects as Lineage

My father said honey ran down the wall in his boyhood home. It came around the metal plate covering the kitchen hole where the winter’s bellied stove attached to the chimney. He told me how when the air was cool and instinct inactive, he and my grandfather hunted with sure sticks and burlap bags.  From their...