A Visit to the Parrish Art Museum

For more about the current exhibition, American Landscapes, click here.

Only Geranium and Melamine

Sad Verso of the Sunny ______________
Liz Waldner

Veldt? Sounds good to me.
Like melt. Back when you could eat Velveeta
and call it cheese. My grandfather's macaroni and cheese
featured a whole brick of Velveeta. I liked peeling away
its beautiful silver wrapper, Velveeta Velveeta all over in blue.

The expanses of time in which there was this grandfather
appeared endless when I was in them. Who
could see to the ends of the plains and so see her end
beyond them? Who could think to look? You
(like Ohio and its vowels) went on forever,
just ate your macaroni and cheese, relishing
the brown bubbles on top, then did the next thing,
were the next moment surrounded and held in it
by all the things you didn't know would end.
Nothing ceded. No portend.
Only geranium and melamine
and thank you,
everywhere preceded by some please.

I Got My Tongue, Got My Chin, Got My Neck, Got My Boobies, Got My Heart, Got My Soul, Got My Back, I Got My Sex (Happy Thanksgiving All!)

Aint Got No - I Got Life (From "Hair") - Nina Simone

An Eerie Silence Just Beyond the Cabin Door

Miss Peach is a Cross Between
Catie Rosemurgy

A missing tooth and a fang.
A bloom and a sandstorm.
A love letter and a trapdoor.
A can opener and a kiss.
A maraca and a spear.

Lowered eyes and a suddenly somewhat disconcerting blow job.
A baroque flute flourish and an eerie silence just beyond the
     cabin door.

A tube top and a biohazard mask.
Goldilocks and an actual bear.

A little blackout on what you think was Tuesday
and a little black spot on your latest chest x-ray.

A little black period
that holds down words like a tack
and a bright little universe
that loves to turn black.

Cardinal for Dark Mornings

And a poem by James Schuyler, courtesy of Gabrielle Calvocoressi, who sent this to me today....

This Dark Apartment
James Schuyler

Coming from the deli
a block away today I
saw the UN building
shine and in all the
months and years I’ve
lived in this apartment
I took so you and I
would have a place to
meet I never noticed
that it was in my view.

I remember very well
the morning I walked in
and found you in bed
with X. He dressed
and left. You dressed
too. I said, “Stay
five minutes.” You
did. You said, “That’s
the way it is.” It
was not much of a surprise.

Then X got on speed
and ripped off an
antique chest and an
air conditioner, etc.
After he was gone and
you had changed the
Segal lock, I asked
you on the phone, “Can’t
you be content with
your wife and me?” “I’m
not built that way,”
you said. No surprise.

Now, without saying
why, you’ve let me go.
You don’t return my
calls, who used to call
me almost every evening
when I lived in the coun-
try. “Hasn’t he told you
why?” “No, and I doubt he
ever will.” Goodbye. It’s
mysterious and frustrating.

How I wish you would come
back! I could tell
you how, when I lived
on East 49th, first
with Frank and then with John,
we had a lovely view of
the UN building and the
Beekman Towers. They were
not my lovers, though.
You were. You said so.

Eat a Lot and Live a Long Time!

An astonishing scene from John Cassavetes' A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE, which we watched again over the weekend. Be sure to stay with it to the 7:17 mark. Transformation!

Invincible

A shot of Newark's empty Hahne & Company department store, which I took on the way to a faculty dinner this past Tuesday. And below, another long-gone emporium: Baltimore's Hutzler's, the subject of my brother Michael's book, which is reviewed in today's Baltimore Sun.

From Hutzler's: Where Baltimore Shops
MIchael J. Lisicky

I don’t quite understand my passion for department stores. I think I’ll blame it on my mother.

As a child my mother would pack the car with my brothers and me and we would be off on a road trip that usually centered around shopping. I didn’t necessarily enjoy the shopping but I did love spending time with my family while discovering new cities, new restaurants and new stores.

I grew up in southern New Jersey directly across the river from Philadelphia. My mother loved Philadelphia’s Strawbridge & Clothier department store. Her first job was at Strawbridge’s and for a number of years she sang in the Strawbridge & Clothier Chorus. She eventually stopped working at the store but it was always” her store”. Even as a small child I always knew when it was ‘Clover Day’ at Strawbridge’s. Clover Day was a tradition and that’s what Strawbridge & Clothier stood for, tradition.

There were other stores in Philadelphia. My mother bought her shoes and tires for the car at Lit Brothers. She also spent a lot of time buying her kids’ clothes in Gimbels’ Budget Store. (I don’t think I even went to the main floor of Gimbels until I graduated from high school.) We also had John Wanamaker but for some reason it always seemed out of our reach. I don’t know quite why.

When you live in the Philadelphia area you can travel to many different cities, large and small, within a two hour drive. I loved how each city seemed to have its own personality. Since my mother would always take us shopping I always paid attention to the different stores. I loved all of the different names. I loved all of the different logos. I truly felt like I was ‘out of town’. When I saw ‘Hess’s’ I knew we were in Allentown. When I saw ‘Dunham’s’ I knew we were in Trenton. When I saw ‘Hutzler’s’ I knew we were in Baltimore.

Hutzler’s always seemed so invincible. Its downtown store seemed so monumental yet personal. As a child, I was always concerned how Clay Street ran right through the building. I was also a little scared at the way the store spelled out ‘HUTZLER’ with its Art Deco lettering. (I always thought ‘Why not Hutzler’s?) No visit to Baltimore was complete with a stop at the Towson Hutzler’s on the way back home. At the time it seemed that Towson was nothing more than Towson University and Hutzler’s. I couldn’t imagine that that would ever change.

Verde Lakes Existed as a Possibility

Zach Lazar reading from Evening's Empire at Canio's in Sag Harbor tonight.


from Evening's Empire
Zachary Lazar

NInety miles north of Phoenix, in Yasqui County, Arizona, is a large subdivision of mobile homes and small, single-story houses called Verde Lakes. The lake once belonged to a sprawling ranch, dating back to the late nineteenth century, when the nearby town of Camp Verde had been established to fend off raids from the Yavapai and Apache tribes that had lived for generations in that region. In the summer of 1969--the summer of the moon landing--my father, Edward Lazar, and his business partner, Ned Warren, Sr., financed a down payment on this land with a loan from a London-born entrepreneur named David Rich. They paid this money into a trust, and the company they formed, Consolidated Mortgage Corporation, hired crews to remake the ranch house into a clubhouse, to excavate a small lake where there had been none, to bring in breeding pairs of ducks, and to plant three-inch high sapling trees. They did not build houses on the land, nor did they intend to. Verde Lakes existed as a possibility. As a fact, it was empty desert divided on a map into quarter-acre lots. The plan was to retail hundreds of these lots to small-scale investors, many of them nearing retirement, who would build their own houses there or resell the land once its value rose. The company hired Cesar Romero, the actor most famous for playing the Joker on TV's Batman, as a public relations spokesman. They installed roads and utilities and water lines for homes that did not yet exist. They did all of this on credit, soliciting capital from banks, corporations, and private investors throughout the country, using as collateral and sometimes selling as securities the mortgages on the lots sold by the company's salesmen. For a brief while, my father was a paper millionaire. For a much longer time, he was in financial crisis. At one point, he and his partner, Warren, were personally $2 million in debt. When my father got out of the land business in 1973, he had nothing to show for his four years of struggle. I was five years old then. He was a devoted father according to everyone I've talked to, though I have almost no memories of him that I can feel certain are true and not the kind suggested by photographs.

A Breaking Into the Garden?

from Transcendental Studies
Keith Waldrop

"I have trekked far," is the quiet reply. To which we should add that when it was all made--with such a perfect blending of love, secret enterprise, and malevolent cunning--it was left outside. The actions seem to be wholly mysterious, as is fitting. We must reemphasize the complete independence of the author and his traces. Can we say that they are a "pathos"? an "image"? a "Nothing"? A breaking into the garden? Or a bridge? In any case, after this there is, for a time, no ghost in the stairwell, though a light appears in some neighboring window and goes out again.

(The collage below--Untitled {Man and Column], 1989-- is also by Keith Waldrop.)

Ate and Glowing Tree

Ate - Alvin Band

Glowing Tree - Alvin Band

Or Hardly Any Harm

From "Wenlock Edge" in Alice Munro's new collection, Too Much Happiness, just out today...

*****

My mother had a bachelor cousin a good deal younger than her, who used to visit us on the farm every summer. He brought along his mother, Aunt Nell Botts. His own name was Ernie Botts. He was a tall, florid man with a good-natured expression, a big square face, and fair curly hair springing straight up from his forehead. His hands, his fingernails were as clean as soap itself; his hips were a little plump. My name for him--when he was not around--was Earnest Bottom. I had a mean tongue.

But I meant no harm. Or hardly any harm.

After Aunt Nell Botts died Ernie did not come to visit anymore, but he always sent a Christmas card.

When I started college in the city where he lived, he began a custom of taking me out to dinner every other Sunday evening. He did this because I was a relative--it's unlikely that he even considered whether we were suited to spending time together. He always took me to the same place, a restaurant called the Old Chelsea, which was on the second floor of a building, looking down on Dundas Street. It had velvet curtains, white tablecloths, little rose-shaded lamps on the tables. It probably cost more, strictly speaking, than he could afford, but I did not think of that, having a country girl's notion that all men who lived in the city, wore a suit every day, and sported such clean fingernails had reached a level of prosperity where indulgences like this were a matter of course.

I always ordered the most exotic offering on the menu--chicken vol au vent or duck a l'orange --while he always ate roast beef. Desserts were wheeled up to the table on a dinner wagon: a tall coconut cake, custard tarts topped with strawberries, even out of season, chocolate-coated pastry horns full of whipped cream. I took a long time choosing, like a five-year-old trying to decide between flavors of ice cream, and then on Monday I had to fast all day, to make up for such gorging.

The First Chimp to Develop the Ability to Speak

Click here for the Publishers Weekly story about my former student Ben Hale's forthcoming novel, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, which is narrated by the first chimp to develop the ability to speak.

(I should make it clear that Ben was already a fully formed writer when he was in my Sarah Lawrence fiction workshop back in 2005. In fact, he should have been sitting in my seat and running the show.)

Weekend in San Diego (Or: Mexico Only)

From the balcony of my room at the Hilton

The Hotel del Coronado

Beach at Coronado #1

Beach at Coronado #2

Tower at the Hotel del Coronado

As close to the border as we got. That mountain is Tijuana.

Hello from the food court of the San Diego International Airport, Terminal 2. I'm on my way back to JFK after spending the weekend here for a reading and workshop at the University of San Diego. I couldn't have had a better time, no small thing given the fact that it came at a hectic point in the school year. Sweet, smart students; sweet, smart faculty. And Brad Melekian's introduction was the kind of introduction that every writer dreams of: serious, exact, compassionate. Brad's sending me a digital copy later, which I'll post in an update here.

As to how they coaxed`180+ people to come out to a reading on a Friday night? I think a part of it might have had to do with the fact that the work of the visiting writers is taught as part of the curriculum. Not just in English and writing classes, but in other humanities classes. (And here I'd been thinking maybe...thirty people?) The mark of an amazing, ambitious curriculum.

I hadn't realized how much I'd needed a weekend of escape. Warmth and sun and palms and tropical plants. A little like pushing the reset button. And here I thought I'd been so tired....

After Saturday's workshop, I met up with my good pal Deborah Lott, who took me to Coronado. We had a happy, peaceful lunch at the Hotel del Coronado, the big Victorian, Falcon Crestish compound on the ocean. I inadvertently mentioned our proximity to Mexico one too many times after our lunch, so after we left, Deborah started driving south in that direction. We drove through Imperial Beach. We drove through San Ysidro, where the signs along I-5 say: Guns Illegal in Mexico. What is it about borders? What is it about the other side that's so compelling? Of course neither of us had our passports with us, but we drove as far south as we could before turning west at the last exit. And a few hundred feet south was that steel wall, lit up by lights right out of a maximum security prison. And there was the same wall rising up behind the outlet mall, ominous in sodium vapor glow.

*****

Update: Here's Brad Melekian's generous introduction, which I should pin up next to my desk, as something to aspire to!

Paul Lisicky Intro

Good evening. For those of you who do not know me, my name is Bradley Melekian, and I am an instructor in the English Department here at the University of San Diego.

It is my great pleasure this evening to welcome you to the Cropper Writers Series. If I may take a moment, I'd like to second my colleague Joseph Jeon in extending our gratitude to Barrie and Dorothy Cropper. This semester, I have had the privilege of guiding a group of writing students here at USD in a series of Saturday morning workshops that runs in conjunction with these readings. If anyone is currently a college student, was at one point a college student, or knows a college student, then you'll know what a remarkable fact it is that this group of students voluntarily wakes up early on Saturday mornings to attend class, and does so with enthusiasm. This, I believe, is a testament to the excitement for the writing program on our campus, much of which would not exist without the support of the Croppers. I would also like to note the very real impact that the interaction with authors has had on these students, all of whom are here this evening, as they set about the work of developing their own voices in writing stories, applying to graduate writing programs, and thinking about what a writing life is in the twenty-first century. Having the opportunity to interact directly with exemplary writers makes all of the difference in the world, and it is not overstating the case, I do not believe, to say that the work of the Cropper Writers Series is changing lives here at USD in a very real way.

All of which brings me to this evening's event, and our distinguished guest tonight, Mr. Paul Lisicky. Paul Lisicky is a graduate of the world-renowned Iowa Writers' Workshop, and is also the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Henfield Foundation, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a fellow. Mr. Lisicky has taught at Cornell University, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, Antioch University-Los Angeles, The University of Houston, and The Bread Loaf Writers Conference. His books, Lawnboy, a novel, and Famous Builder, a memoir have been received with critical acclaim. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham has referred to Lisicky as "a writer who deeply respects the complexities of love and desire, who can find tragedy and transcendence almost everywhere he looks."

In his more recent work, Lisicky has turned that power of observation to the limitations imposed by genre, writing pieces of literature that transcend classification as fiction or non-fiction, defying even the generously broad labels of prose poem, short short, hybrid and so on. Instead Lisicky is simply crafting pieces of literature whose form, subject and tenor warn against easy taxonomy. In reading these pieces, I am struck by how the disregard for genre leaves a reader without the typical ballasts with which we tend to steady ourselves, forcing us instead to focus solely on the words on the page. And what is on the page in reading Lisicky is an intense power of observation, a commitment to the impelling force of a well-crafted and highly musical sentence, and most often a pronounced meditation on identity.

One such moment comes early in the novel "Lawnboy," when the book's 17-year-old protagonist, Evan Sarshik, is faced with the specter of deciding what type of person to become against the backdrop of his own homosexuality. "Was I becoming myself?," Evan wonders. "Or was I stalled, trapped before some rust-clenched gate while everyone else was getting somewhere?"

Throughout his work, one sees in Lisicky's characters just this type of reflective search for what constitutes a meaningful identity. Lisicky's focus on the interior lives of his characters is a means of asking his readers to consider the requisite components of a personhood, and in doing so, he jolts his readers awake to the ways in which life will happen all around us if we don't, to use a literary term, assume agency over our own lives. In an era when technology has all but liberated us from the tediousness of interacting with one another, it is just this type of reflection that makes the case for the necessity of literature in the twenty-first century. For, even as he creates characters burdened by their perceived isolation, Lisicky is suggesting that these struggles for identity are part of our shared humanity. You read Lisicky, in other words, and you realize that you are not alone. For I doubt if anybody in this room can, with just such honest reflection, say that they've never felt themselves standing before that rust-clenched gate, wondering whether they were becoming themselves while everyone else was getting somewhere.

It takes a perceptive person to recognize these truths, but it takes an extraordinary writer to draw them out so fully on the page.

Please join me in welcoming Mr. Paul Lisicky.

(Me at Podium)

These Bobcats These Wolves These Snakes These Squirrels These Scorpions These Bats These Owls

from the October 2009 issue of Keyhole Digest, a story by my student Kevin Catalano.

The Word Made Flesh
Kevin Catalano

And the men came down the mountain, came out the wilderness, cast in furs and skins, the smart of beast and rot and rank on their brown bodies, a fearful mystery in their eyes. Damp early morning, the waiting multitude gasped and backstepped to the lip of the lake crisp at their heels. Women and children and men, they locked arms and shivered not for the cold. From the mountain men charged forth one, fanged and noseless and translucent-eyed, and he spoke, and when he spoke, the creatures of the mount spewed from his mouth. These bobcats these wolves these snakes these squirrels these scorpions these bats these owls these all shrouded the multitude in a deafening cloud. When it was all told, the savage teller reclaimed the creatures into his mouth, and the men retreated back into the wilderness and up the mountain, leaving the lake to lap at the congregation of bones.

The Wonderful Night

City College tonight at 7 PM, just before Denise's tribute.

The reading:

--David Groff from Good Deeds
--DyAnne DiSalvo from Red Whiskey Blues
--Bill Lutz from Peshtigo
--Ron Block from "Bad for Boys"
--J.T. Barbarese from "An Honest Orgy"
--Victoria Redel from "A Woman of Heart and Mind"
--Mark Doty from Trespasses
--Paul Lisicky from Trespasses

The tribute couldn't have been sweeter, more memorable. There we were, eight readers, reading ten minutes a piece, from a range of 25 years of Denise's work. And there was her family sitting in the back. There were old students, and old friends, some from as far away as Northampton, Syracuse, and Glens Falls. And thirty people filled the room, taken in by the power of those narrators, alternately cranky and wistful and bewildered and joyful. (I mean we always knew she was wonderful, but that wonderful? Well, the night knew.)

My introduction to Trespasses:

It’s impossible for me to contain the breadth of a 26-year-long friendship in sentence or two, but here’s an image: it’s 1986, and I’m lying on the floor of my father’s den, listening to the tenth draft of the tenth chapter of Red Whiskey Blues. I’m nervous because I don’t yet have the vocabulary to tell Denise how much I love it, how much I think this version was better than the last. She’s nervous because she thinks I’m not as knocked out as she wants me to be; she wants me to gasp. In a little while, I’ll read something of mine. And in this way we’ll spend years and years on the phone. We’ll teach each other attention. We’ll lead each other deeper into the scary, beautiful forest we call literature.

And from a Facebook post by the lovely Susan Stinson, who came to the reading all the way from Northampton:

Last night, I went to a memorial reading of work by the fiction writer, Denise Gess. I didn't know Denise, and was moved to hear such range, so much wit, intensity, and narrative power, and to feel with characters so much in relationship with others, with so much at stake in that.

Thanks once again to Brandon Judell and City College for helping to make the night happen.

Update: A photo of Denise I'd never seen before, courtesy of DyAnne DiSalvo...

Reminder! (Denise Gess Tribute Reading)

Mark and I are getting ready for Denise's tribute reading in a few hours. If you're in Manhattan, or close by, it would be lovely to see you. Full details below, and beneath that, the briefest passage from Trespasses, Denise's third novel, which both Mark and I are reading from tonight.

Denise Gess Tribute Reading, featuring J.T. Barbarese, Ron Block, DyAnne DiSalvo, Mark Doty, David Groff, Paul Lisicky, Bill Lutz, Victoria Redel

City College, Tuesday, November 10, 7:30 PM
NAC 6/316 (Sixth floor North Academic Center, between 137th and 138th on Amsterdam Avenue.)
Take 1 Train, get off at 137th and Broadway, and walk a block east to Amsterdam.

*****

from Trespasses
Denise Gess

Because the night was so incredibly still and dark--the street lamps burned out like matches--because there was nothing to illuminate Lenny's belt buckle or the shiny chrome of the fender, Rosalie thought she imagined the resigned voice that floated up from the driveway. She jangled her keys once, a signal, and heard Lenny sneeze. Sure enough, when she followed the direction of the sound she found him lying on the ground, in line with the heavy black tires. He was on his side, his knees drawn up as if he had a stomach cramp or a charley horse, some expected run-of-the-mill pain people made no effort to conceal, not even from strangers. A cricket trilled.

"What are you waiting for?" he asked.

She couldn't believe her eyes or ears, couldn't believe that this absurd day could get any more absurd. "Lenny, get up from down there."

"I don't think so," he said in a voice thick with effort. Rosalie squeezed the keys till they dug into her hands. She'd had just about enough thwarting for one day.

"I'm going to buy make-up. The make-up I wanted this afternoon, the make-up I couldn't buy because of you and your crazy idea that you're some kind of Jimmy the Greek. I need mascara--not a fur coat, not an emerald ring--and I need it now."

He didn't budge, nor did he say anything more.

"Do you want me to run you over?"

"Like an ant," he said. "What the hell."

She surprised herself when after a short pause she said, "Fine."

*****

Click here for a podcast of the Rowan University tribute to Denise last month. Scroll down to the link marked Writer's Roundtable.

Stupefied, Astonished

From today's New York Times: nine poets on the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, including Mark and Marie. Click here to read the entire set.

***

The Iron Curtain
Marie Howe

And the nun asked us-- were we seven?--what we would do if the
    Communists
stormed our houses and bound our parents and threatened to kill
    them. Would you
renounce Jesus in order to save your mother from being murdered?
                           We knew what the true answer was--
and what was the right one.

My mother stood, cooking a dozen pork chops in the two big frying
    pans, when I told her
that I'd said that I'd let her die before
I turned my back on Jesus.
      And my mother said that that was all right; she understood.

When the wall came down I was distracted. By what? A man I loved
    and longed for?
A self integrating so slowly most days I hardly knew who I was?

Brick by brick. Some men pushed it with what looked like
    long pillars.
Some kids sat on top, waving.

We'd been told families had been divided--crossing the city to work or
    shop--
caught on the wrong side when the wall went up. And that was that.
    People
lived and died, and married.

How strange to see them walking, on TV, through the empty air--
what had been solid--stupefied, astonished...

                           How they touched the faces of their loved ones
                           and ran their hands over their heads and hair.

***

The Lesson
Mark Doty

Some workers put up a wall on 25th Street,
plywood sheathing a frame of 2 x 4s, to seal the building
they’d gut and remake. Then they added layers:

stacks of metal pipe bound with black webbing,
a layer of permits, photocopied signatures far removed
from whatever hand inscribed them.

Then a blue expanding ladder, hydraulic,
squatting on its haunches. My friend John took pictures
of the whole unlikely and elaborate composition,

barrier and palimpsest, warning and advertisement.
How could you not look at it, with its tears and concealments?
And though such photos might aestheticize,

allowing us to stand at an annealing distance
from the wreck of things, I think his do something else;
in this way I begin to look at walls.

Decaled plexi between my face and the back of the cab driver’s head.
Blue shroud on 16th like the robe of Venus rippling over the entry
of Pottery Barn, and inside it some burr-grinder

scouring away at the stone. The insidious barrier –
who could put their hands on it? – dividing me and the dark young men
under the scaffolding near my corner, smoking by the door

of the technical school. All going back somehow to the story
one of my teachers told, voice slipping to a register we’d never heard
in our room’s calm rows: how a lover,

desperate to reach the beloved on the other side,
strapped himself beneath a car, face pressed up
into the undercarriage, the back of his head

inches above the pavement; how he’d tried to refuse,
with his own body at least, the sundering of his city.
Did he live, did he ever arrive? I remember only

my teacher beginning to weep, and we children
in our low-slung new school building in Tucson,
the desert freshly scraped to make way for us,

we didn’t understand, what was the lesson?
John’s pictures brought that back -- and how,
decades later, the night they first scaled the wall,

the people at the top reached down to pull up
the others, and shouted Come on, come on!
When the guards turned the water cannons on them,

they sprayed back from open bottles of champagne.
Then the broken chunks appeared, in the hands of those
who had loosened them, fragments of concrete

glazed with spray paint inscriptions, scarred
with sledgehammer and chisel: instruments of union.
A demanding beauty about them,

whatever was scrawled perhaps capable
of realigning, as words in what language?
Something barely spoken yet.

Happy Birthday, Joni!

Frost! (And I Ain't Talking Robert)

October 11, 2009

November 7, 2009

Leaving Marks on Soulful Strangers

I've Been Thinking A Lot About Heaven Lately

Heaven
from The End of Youth
Rebecca Brown

I've been thinking a lot about heaven lately. I've been trying to imagine it. In one version heaven is a garden, not Eden, but a great, big vegetable garden with patches of zucchini and crookneck and summer squash and lots of heavy tomato vines with beefsteak and cherry and yellow tomatoes getting perfectly, perfectly ripe, and zinnias and cosmos and lots of other flowers. There's an old lady in the garden. It's sunny out and she's wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt. She's healthy and tan and stooping down over one of these plants. Lying half asleep in the sun on the path behind her is a cat and they are happy.

In the other version, heaven is a big field near a lake. It's early in the day, before the sun has risen, and the air is brisk and cool and ducks are flying overhead. There's a guy in the field, a tall, strong guy with the healthy clean-smelling sweat of someone walking. He's wearing his duck hunting gear, his waders and corduroy hat and pocketed vest. He's moving toward the water's edge where he'll shoot a couple of birds to bring home to his family.

The lady in the first heaven is my mother, brown-skinned and plump, with a full head of hair, the way she was before she turned into the bald, gray-skinned sack of bones she was the month she died. The guy in the second version is my father, clear-eyed and strong and confident, not the sad and volatile, cloudy-eyed drunk he was for his last forty years. I've been thinking about heaven because ever since my parents died I've wished I believed in some place I could imagine them. I wish I could see the way I did when I was young.

She Also Kissed Dogs on the Mouth

from "I Am the Lion Now"
Edan Lepucki

Margaret took a bath. The tub, like all tubs in apartments worth living in, was grimy. She had scrubbed it many times, but the porcelain remained gray and streaked with rust around the drain. She didn’t mind. She also kissed dogs on the mouth, didn’t wash her fruit. Let the squeamish suffer their fear, let them live without really living. Margaret was safe in her risk taking.

In the kitchen, Toby baked a cake, his second: the first one had burned. Margaret had assumed he’d forgotten to turn on the timer, but this was deliberate. He’d wanted to have sex, more than he wanted to eat cake, and he knew that if the timer went off in the middle, they would stop to handle it. They were married, and passion was not greater than cake.

Click here to read the full version in Narrative Magazine.

The Furnace Checked? Draughts Caulked? Soup Bubbling?

from "Notes from Madoo"
in the East Hampton Star, October 31, 2009
Robert Dash

Exorbitant autumn, you take to dying far too long/turning green gold, ruby, citron/abscided leaves strewing more color than
June/you funny season, some crocuses bounce up again/sap falls where once it fountained/you begin to topple/barging winds are in from the north/branches, leaves, sap berries, nuts, all fall/crops are pulled, cover sown, much tilling to be done by frost heave/plenty leads to sorrow/abundance to lean/gifts go so to redistribute/love is not for one place or time/the inch of an hour is miles from its beginning/days diminish/darkness grows/ and then the wind/and then the cold/blue shadows/no odor/thin air/gray your face/your hair/black dogs of ocean waves howl/everything covered is bare/shapes pitiful to see/see, that is where lightning struck where wind wrenched off a branch/one tree on another fell/winter deer ate half the bark/or the mower gouged/saplings not staked grew askew/and there are always the sunlight’s decisive culls/the year of moths or locusts/the year of late frost/drought, heat, fire/nothing is left in the winter except winter/oldest time of the year/sky barely blue/the story of the year completed/no listeners remain/go home/stay warm/over and over/is the wood in?/the furnace checked?/draughts caulked?/soup bubbling?/extra socks and sweaters/don’t forget gloves and earmuffs/that long red scarf/the more layers the better/coffee with plenty of sugar/lady apples make fine clove apples/there’s nothing like that smell in winter/not even pine cones/puddings/brandied this, brandied that/and plenty of jams and pickles/is ice on the inside of the window/the door stuck?/the steps have melted and frozen a nasty, dingy white/the cat is cross/the dog full of twitching dreams/bruise-blue the catastrophes around you/stay inside/here is where you will be the whole of the long winter.