Poem Following a Line from Philip Larkin
On the day of the explosion, cows
kept chewing and we went to work,
coughing out dismay in prosaic bursts
and scrolling news, weighing the chance
of an early winter. On the morning
Poem Following a Line from Philip Larkin
On the day of the explosion, cows
kept chewing and we went to work,
coughing out dismay in prosaic bursts
and scrolling news, weighing the chance
of an early winter. On the morning
Six hours altogether. Rp300k taxi fare; 10k was return on the train.
We had chosen the date badly. Muslim New Year and a long weekend meant a queue at the station ticket-office, seats sold out. The standing option was declined;
Tiresias sits alone chewing gum like Lolita. Her dog, Little St. James, sleeps on her lap. Even though her implants are hurting, she soldiers on and will tease the disaster out of the moment. The other passengers have
Treasures
You are eight when on a visit to your father’s aunt you see beautiful things. Great Aunt lives alone in a tiny red cabin on the edge of a small town. Before her husband died, he built shelves throughout to display
We would come to blows we got so bored. On bulk pickup day, we rummaged the tree lawns and the alleys. We plucked a waterlogged guitar. It had two rusted strings that broke. We snapped them against our wrists until we broke
Outside the kitchen window, the wind is whipping, jostling the tree branches with a vigor I haven’t seen for a while. So of course I have to stop washing the dishes and drive to the hilltop park.
Standing on the grassy peak, I avail
Roundabout
Mike looks at me like I make him sick. I may have done something to make him mad, but I can’t remember what. Maybe I did and maybe I didn’t, or maybe he wants me to believe I deserve to be scorned with his eyes.
In the Price Chopper, and I am about to grab a can of Niblets, quick Thursday dinner, when Dow, who is teaching Bio this semester, sneaks up behind me. There is all kinds of Phil Collins around us in the air, and Dow is his usual sweat on his upper
A tropical storm had formed somewhere off the coast and was forecasted to turn into a hurricane, so we cut our vacation short and drove home in silence. My wife Kate caught me having eyes for other women at the beach. I had forgotten my
Hats
I got fired from my job at CVS for stealing Prilosec OTC to alleviate the horrendous side-effects of my chronic GERD, so I started buying novelty baseball hats from China and selling them on the sidewalk in front of my apartment building. My girlfriend
1. VR with 360, with immersion, with immediacy: it is the ultimate empathy machine says one practitioner/promoter. Thing is, the writer in Art Forum argues, it’s empathy for yourself, in yourself, with yourself. VR is stuck in its vividness
You have just buried your second dog. The afternoon is getting sticky. You put the spade back in the garage, kick off the boots and pour yourself two fingers of Gordon’s. You sit down and listen to the neighbor’s guard
I @mentioned Yang in our WeChat group chat at eight AM my time and PM their time, telling her I dreamed of her being a North Korean spy. In my dream she was only revealed as being from North Korea,
(René Taïcon: 1930 Archives départmentales Pas-de-Calais 4Z482 Sous-prefecture de Saint-Omer, France)
My mother was Fridolin, a boy of fourteen. He pushed me forward in the soup line, and dealt
It wasn’t really a food court, which was a bunch of restaurants in a mall or a building lobby. This was a buffet, different offerings set up in a single dining space, a meal included in the price of a room, here in the hotel.
“It’s
Tonight, while we sleep, new cones are developing in the eyes of ten million, never before seen. If you have ever watched a time lapse of a watermelon growing, it’s like that. Nothing for weeks, until miraculously, something.
She painted all sorts of paintings, my other grandmother. Lots of paintings of clowns. Nudes. When I was a kid she painted the Space Shuttle Columbia. Not the one that exploded, that was the Challenger,
What I tell him is this—let’s shoot a film / not a serious feature / but a movie you make with your friends / no stunts or dialogue / only us / goofing off / drawing in dirt / painting white circles with mops / clapping
- a region of southern Greece
- a mythological place of rustic innocence and pastoral pleasure: paradise, utopia, Eden, Shangri-La, nirvana
- a metaphor for an ideal but unattainable world
“Et in Arcadia Ego”
I missed the
Here’s one thing about my mum.
She used to collect paper. She had an old grey-blue folder, tattered, giving up at the edges. Written on it, in her precise yet bouncy red marker letters, it read: “Cartotecnica e varie”. Which