We ironed fall leaves between wax-paper sheets. We melted crayons into candles and froze Kool-Aid into popsicles. We poked cloves into oranges. We grew roots on sweet potatoes tooth-picked in water. We taped our broken glasses together and shut up. We made shoe-box dioramas with Play-Doh and modelin…
Catalog
Quotes tagged ‘The Slowdown’
I was making a roast. The smell wafted from the kitchen into the living room, through the yellow curtains and into the sunlight. Bread warmed in the oven, and in my oven mitt, I managed to forget that I’d ever punched someone in the face. It seemed so long ago, I might not even have done it. I went…
It’s called Sisyphus. No. Sisyphus. Yes. Apparently some Greek myth. This guy is punished for—punished—yes— for something, and has to roll a rock up a hill every day and every day it rolls—a rock, yes— and every day it rolls back down. Something about the absurdity of life. Camus says—Camooo—says it…
The number of rice grains left in your supper bowl foretells how many pockmarks will appear on your lover’s face Sleeping on your back will flatten your head’s shape but sleep on your stomach and you’ll induce nightmares Eating the fat inside the crab sharpens the mind so too the roe extracted from…
'If this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called the thing he felt inside him the silence of snow.' -Orhan Pamuk Before the hanging cross, the girls take turns standing at attention before us with eyes closed or hands clasped, headbands bright green or bangles yellow, glints that fill the…
A classmate and I chose pendulums, what happens when a pendulum hangs from a pendulum? How does gravity work then? We were studying invisible forces and left the classroom, heading into the world with just our two bodies, which were to be both string and bob. In the woods behind school, he climbed i…
everyone wants to know what I saw on the long walk away from you I couldn’t eat and didn’t sleep for an entire week I can hardly picture any of it now save the fox I thought was in the grass but wasn’t I remember him quiet as a telescope tiny as a Plutonian moon everything else was wilding around us…
When the bass drops on Bill Withers’ Better Off Dead, it’s like 7 a.m. and I confess I’m looking over my shoulder once or twice just to make sure no one in Brooklyn is peeking into my third-floor window to see me in pajamas I haven’t washed for three weeks before I slide from sink to stove in one lo…
Today is a trumpet to set the hounds baying. The past is a fox the hunters are flaying. Nothing unspoken goes without saying. Love’s a casino where lovers risk playing. The future’s a marker our hearts are prepaying. The future’s a promise there’s no guaranteeing. Today is a fire the field mice are…
The guy Dad sold your car to comes back to get his money, leaves the car. With filthy rags we rub it down until it doesn’t shine and wipe your blood into the seams of the seat. Each snowflake stirs before lifting into the sky as I learn you won’t be dead. The unsuffering ends when the mess of your h…
A man walks into a coffee shop. But it’s not a joke. I bought coffee there last summer. Small, with milk. It’s never a joke to walk in or out of a shop unharmed. It’s easy to forget you aren’t a person being shot at. I’m not. I wasn’t, though I was there, last summer. Not-shot-at and I never knew it…
Koko Taylor walked up on John Henry took the hammer right out his hand and bent it and twisted it into a fine necklace and took him to a real nice dinner. Koko Taylor had twelve thousand wigs. One she never wore. Just kept at home. Was enchanted, spun from gold and full of rubies, and sang to her at…
My mother was in the hospital & everyone wanted to be my friend. But I was busy making a list: good dog, bad citizen, short skeleton, tall mocha. Typical Tuesday. My mother was in the hospital & no one wanted to be her friend. Everyone wanted to be soft cooing sympathies. Very reasonable pigeons. No…
She couldn’t stop—she did it almost every afternoon while they napped or later sat upstairs with homework. She listened to the scrape of desk chairs on the ceiling while she measured and blended, hummed from oven to sink, redolence rising in a sweet promise she thought was required, didn’t know how…
abuelita’s hands were a time card she clocked in and out, morning and night. they were a pile of dirty sheets at the foot of a bed, gnarled broomsticks, dustpans, and sooty vacuums, her hands were soiled rags in yellow gloves, they were two pillows beaten of mites and dead skin, her hands were paper…