Beadie

An ass­hole is an ass­hole but I love a first sen­tence. The thing is there isn’t much of one—it’s just what you believe in from before you knew it to what exists past us. I’m watch­ing Jimmy. I’m watch­ing myself cross my legs. I am some­where –more

–more

I can hear their voic­es through the wait­ing room walls. My daugh­ter, with her big per­son­al­i­ty and pearl-speck­led beret, mak­ing the den­tal assis­tants and hygien­ists laugh. That baby girl came fast the first day of win­ter. A hard, cold day of gray asphalt –more

I love Ruby Sales. She’s taught us a lot. You can google her sto­ry, see how she lost the abil­i­ty to speak for a spell at sev­en­teen when a white man squeezed the trig­ger of a shot­gun and blew a hole in the body of a young white sem­i­nar­i­an named Jonathon –more

Housemaid’s Knee

“I am get­ting a house­maid­’s knee, kneel­ing here gulp­ing beauty.”
                –Amelia Earhart

This is the knee’s response
to the poem. It is the callous
that can’t afford a white dress,

the price of inno­cence rising
like –more

To the riv­er La Varenne run­ning over the rock dam at the bot­tom of my garden

To the tow­er of the 11th-cen­tu­ry church, Notre Dame sur L’Eau, I see from the win­dow of my third-floor study

To the cloud-fil­tered light of Normandy that inspired –more

The way I know all of what hap­pens today is that when you die, the whole world opens up to you, and you can, if you so wish, go back and forth through all of your years includ­ing these last hours, in no time at all. There is, con­trary to pop­u­lar belief, –more

1. An out-of-con­trol trol­ley hur­tles toward

It’s a large uni­ver­si­ty library, many cor­ners to hide in. I lost my purse there.

All kinds of things get lost.

Even libraries dis­ap­pear. The Great Library at Alexandria burned, but one has hope that frag­ments will sur­face in some cave or shop –more

Each motel room had a set of French doors fac­ing the ocean and out­side the doors was a wood­en board­walk paint­ed gray. The man paid for one of these rooms for three nights in advance. He said he might stay longer and the desk clerk said that would not –more

SUBJECT:  LG French Door refrigerator
MODEL:  LFC21776ST
FEATURES: Stainless Steel fin­ish, LED –more

(from NWW archives)

Earl MacKenzie owned a movie ranch in Chatsworth, California. The place was a col­lec­tion of facades, all of them made of wood that had aged to the col­or of a jackrab­bit. The facades lined two blocks of a dusty street, and on them –more

I am not alone among writ­ers in pre­tend­ing that I have a “very visu­al sense” of what I’m writ­ing about.  Putting it this way sug­gests, even to me, that I have untapped tal­ents – except for the fact that I don’t real­ly have them.  My hus­band, –more

Her dreams last night had been red dreams, that was all she could say. Not red like blood, more like the red of the first tulips, a shock of col­or that blasts away the cold and the pale pas­tels of cro­cus­es and daf­fodils. Red dreams, trav­el­ing dreams. –more

Sometimes I stop read­ing a book, not because I do not like the book but because I like it far too much. There may be a sense that I resent the book hav­ing a cer­tain kind of author­i­ty which I want to defy, by ignor­ing it for a time, or chas­ing –more

When Donna brings home the exer­cise book from the library, her eight-year-old daugh­ter Tess says of the bare-stom­ached woman on the book’s cov­er, “Sexy! She’s got six-pack abs!”

Donna looks at the abs in ques­tion. What she sees is cater­pil­lar –more

Aquarium

“Think of it,” the moth­er said, “as if it were a secret, hid­den city underwater.”
“Think of it,” the moth­er said, “as if it were a mov­ing sculp­ture in time.”
The daugh­ter said, “I think of it as fish.”
***
–more

Certainly, I admired before I met
you, a per­son who was doing what I
could not imag­ine, and not for yourself
but for oth­ers, the way animals
adopt lost souls of anoth­er species.
Afterwards, I –more

My lit­tle sis­ter heard about the monks who slept in coffins the bet­ter to under­stand life so she asked my broth­er to make her one. He took some lum­ber from a half-fin­ished house down the street and in our garage instruct­ed my sis­ter in the use –more