COOKING DINNER Spring again. Its warmer breeze. Open screen door. Another war buds up, pliant and green, thick spores of restlessness like pollen in the air–you could sneeze with it; your heart could stop beating in a moment. ____bless you, you’re whispering. …
CHEERS They could have been us hours ago. Two figures huddled hip to hip in their parkas like one big foam finger for the sky’s yearly coughing of sparks and spangles, these percussive pops that stand in so often for independence, the blank case, the empty shell. It took the human race five thousand years …
THE MEMORY OF WATER It can be demonstrated with thermo- luminescence: the salt solution retains knowledge of what it once held, though nature, though logic would tell it otherwise. Dumb as a bedpan, the hydrogen bond remembers the lithium, the sodium chloride no matter how long distilled. There is so little purity left in the …
BEATING BALAAM’S ASS Numbers 22:30 The books are wrong, you know, and the priests—they’re told only what to tell the children. Look both ways, don’t shit where you eat, that sort of thing. And the children listen. And I listen. And the priests, they listen most, their clean heads lowered in …
MICROCASSETTE At first it was just a gift, the batteries not included, but wrapped neatly in a smaller box, a matching bow with the same generous loop of silver, its paper the same gaudy green. Try it out, she told him, and so he did. Is this the way I sound? he said. Is this …