…had the patience for caesura, compression, broken lines. It was weird, now that she thought of it, but she’d stopped reading poetry completely after getting stuck in a box canyon in southern Utah. She couldn’t concentrate. That was nine months ago. To say she’d almost been stuck wasn’t quite accurate. She’d been stuck. She was leading the way on a… [Read More]

The first morning after my last day of fifth grade, Mom informed me that my summer vacation and girlhood were over. Me: Reading A Wrinkle in Time in my room, hoping to pull a Meg Murry and tesseract to another planet. Mom (with a cursory knock while opening the door): “Great news! You get to attend those Summer Enrichment Seminars… [Read More]

…read it once, twice, and saw again the deep furrows around your mother’s mouth, vivid in your mind from earlier when she’d drifted away from your cab toward the airport counters. The loneliness you always felt after reading her letters suffocated you now. The room echoed thickly with your breathing, and you sat for a while clutching the letter, upset… [Read More]

…Summit — University of Minnesota Arboretum, Fall 1998 We meet outside the city to discuss the mind of poetry, and crowning the speaker’s head, the arboretum fills up the conference room’s window: an epiphany of maples. The papery consciousness of birch against the sky’s blue concentration flags the roots of our connections. But reading the daily papers — from New… [Read More]

…men possibly share with the shimmering beckon and promise of Paris? As for my father, I had never thought to question his loyalty, or whether he felt the same as our neighbors. I had simply assumed it. But in the wake of Khalida’s words a bright barbed fear had taken root in my chest, spreading rampant as a weed. My… [Read More]

…eighth most e-mailed New York Times article is about a deadly swine flu outbreak in Mexico. Scientists are “baffled and deeply worried.” I learn two reasons to be baffled and deeply worried in my Mexico City apartment. One: this flu seems to combine bird, swine, and human viruses. Two: this flu is spreading person to person. . . . I… [Read More]

…removed his reading glasses and wiped them with his shirttail. He would think it over. Yakov and his wife were enjoying the respite they awarded themselves every January, except the year his mother died. Seven days of warmth and summer books under palm trees. Seven tropical nights crowded with food, music, exotic drinks and fresh faces. New friends from faraway… [Read More]

…At the table facing him sat a girl whose blond hair hung down to her hips. She was reading Ulysses by James Joyce, whose statue Daniel had encountered on his walk (the town was swarming with ghosts). Under the guise of reading the dessert section of the menu — cakes with names like Casanova and Caesar — Daniel stared at… [Read More]

…reading comforted him—or did it? The reading tormented him—or did it? Sometimes he was sad; sometimes he chuckled. Sometimes there was a tear in his eye. In the distance, the dawn began to break. Satish Kapoor sat on the sofa, the documents all around him, one even on his stomach. He turned to the side, he made a pillow with… [Read More]

…hair, 175 lbs., approximately 50″ (F.B.I. Seattle). Florence Schaffner, a twenty–three–year–old flight attendant, took a seat near Cooper as the plane prepared for takeoff. As the plane accelerated on the runway, Cooper slipped a note to Schaffner. Schaffner was accustomed to men flirting with her on flights, and she dropped the note without reading it into her purse. In his… [Read More]

…the watching? * * * At about age thirteen, I remember my mother, sedated as usual, reclining in bed in the afternoon reading The New York Post, at that time a popular afternoon newspaper. She hears something at the window and pulls up the shade, and is confronted with a pair of eyes—not more than two inches away from hers—looking right at… [Read More]