Explore

Since the day the bell was cast I have sat in the bishop’s carved chair and waited my turn.

It’s hard to save your own life, to take such extreme measures alone.

Call it an echo. Like a sketch of the moon as the moon lies in silvery forms.

Welcome, little citizen. Lend me your presence, and I’ll lend you mine.

“Leaving for war, Hayes wept. He didn’t just cry; he wept...”

I offer you these outs, and it stings when you take me up on them.

“Just sex,” I say, and the old feeling is back, the creeping nausea.

Our griefs perceive what we dismiss: the slight give of stage boards.

They felt smarter and sexier, especially when together.

Liz wore a brass wedding ring, and had no marriage certificate to show.

A woman from the next table eyed him and he eyed her right back.

The moon rescinds its blessing, rests its forehead on a crosier of ivory.

Lynn Freed reads from her collection, The Curse of the Appropriate Man.

I arrived that evening barefoot and swathed in a sort of striped toga.

Time is changing. November 1. Clocks back one hour. New season.

I never entered no-man’s-land by any light brighter than the palest moon.

I am weary of the summer’s darkness in this cavern of elms. I wish the leaves would fall, that one wind would blow them away.

I hear my brother’s wife whisper, It’s her again. Let the machine get it.

The blackness of her hair seemed to pull the color from her body.

Oh, how fascinating it was, watching it all! It was exactly like a play.

Her body had become a scale, a device for measuring grief.

I have a maple in the yard and from time to time all is distant.

We all agreed we would evolve into something, a family of sorts.

Ms. Marmelstein led with her eyelashes, curling out like scimitars.

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters.

I watched to see how the others lived, not knowing I was the Other.

My wife had time to form a thought: I have killed my daughter.

In all the faded retellings of that night, there’s a lot he left out.

My shadow is cast by the paleness of a certain star.

She rocks quickly from side to side, proud, lifting herself higher.