Category: Arts

Playing Telephone

And the winner for the 2008 Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off is… Bill Lane!”

Bill leaned into his wife for a kiss. His son beamed and Bill acknowledged the little boy’s pride with a hearty shake of his shoulder. Bill rose and to acknowledge the audience’s cheers, he smiled, clutched his enormous belt buckle between his thumbs and his forefingers, and yanked up the front of his pants.

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The Affection of Style

James Frey might be the most inarticulate author alive. Also, if he is not one of the most boring, he is clearly the most bored, and his prose is so harried, so egregiously imprecise, that it reads as if it is trying to flee the very tedium of the subject matter.

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Mahmoud et Ariel

“Mr. President, they’re ready to see you now.” “Give me just another minute. I’m almost done.” In an otherwise pristine Oval Office, the President’s desk was littered with unread daily briefs, crayon drawings, baseball cards, and candy wrappers. He had … Read More

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Return to Hue, Vietnam

The heat veil descends the third week of July and the market vendors feel its suffocation. Next to the stall of spices, a woman holds a cleaver, perched just an arm’s length from the spiked jackfruit shell. She brings it … Read More

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Rosemary’s Texas Taco

Denver was becoming acutely aware that at this moment in the road trip, where a second wind might have kicked in, not even the slightest of breezes was blowing. “I know! Lets not go, let’s go somewhere else, we can … Read More

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Hope

Today we dissect Hope.
Grasp firmly your scalpels
and press with caution against its onionskin surface.

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Quaker Motes

“That child is getting a synagogue confirmation as sure as I’m standing here,” Joe told his wife.

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Vignettes from the Hinterlands

On the seventieth anniversary of Ataturk’s death I was in the mountains between Van and Diyarbakir with a baby on my lap and her three year old brother stretched out on the seat behind me while their mother tried to sleep, the silk scarf slipping from her hair.

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“fill all fruit with ripeness to the core”

A Poem.

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Two Poems

BOX You’d handed me the thing because I’d asked to read your letters, made in Romania— not that you’d been there yourself, but from an aunt, you spoke, half-crazy. And because it was a puzzle, you said: Open it. You … Read More

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ambergris

from far away the scent of amber-greased bodies
under the gray electric blue lights

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Healthy

First thing I do when I come home from work every evening is get on the old University cast-off PC and see how my symptoms are doing; listen to my body. I got a little headache some days, a little cold others.

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