A Column of The Miramichi Reader
for Svetlana The artist’s house is an electric still life: a jumble of jetsam, flickering with clues to other worlds and time. She rearranges her collection like assemblage, bringing objects together for a brief encounter while she furiously paints the spirit of their ensemble. You have lost track of what she is telling you because …
After several visits to the tennis courts, I fall in love with the new girl from Greece. I don’t think it’s love at first; I don’t immediately want to kiss her or anything. It’s just the slow way she goes about things. It’s her dark hair and eyes, and her accent—a fusion of Greek and …
That evening, the fish left a strange taste in my mouth. We’d gone together, Dad in his waxed jacket and waders, me in my parka and wellies. Flies hovered above the river, orange-tinged in the afternoon sun. He fastened together his rod and opened his box: flies lined up like soldiers on parade. ‘We’ll try …
Each night, I put on my costume—a long cloth neck, two stubby horns, a patchwork quilt, and stilts—and went out to forage for leaves. I needed a long neck to reach the topmost morsels. But my neck wasn’t going to get any longer from stretching it. No, I understood Darwinian theory. Creatures with long necks …
We spend our days playing in the closet. In our imagination it is a spaceship, a doorway to other worlds, a portal that can travel through time. In the darkness we act out our fantasies, constructing the characters of our narrative. We play with the treasures that surround us – costumes in boxes, paperwork on …
I heave the enormous metal globe up over my shoulders and squeeze my head through the aperture. I wish I could descend into the deep blue sea, but instead I position myself alongside my wife, who’s sitting ever so elegantly on the brocade divan in the studio. ‘Try to relax, dear,’ I whisper. ‘I will …
For you, the best part of our honeymoon was the Giant Tortoises. You’d collect lettuce leaves off the hotel’s buffet table in your handbag, then go to the tropical gardens that surrounded our bedroom veranda. You’d feed the tortoise’s neanderthal faces and stroke the warm mahogany houses on their backs, as if they could feel …
With my round, smooth-bottomed hull, my wide-ribbed belly, I was made for love. We take turns, you and I, filling and being filled. You open a jar, lift a lid, and slip me in your mouth. Your palate favors strong flavors: garlic, lime, pepper, vinegar. Humming, you unscrew jars of cardamom and curry, peel plump …
All day they trudge through the creek sludge, looking for a hair, a thread from her red slippers, a fingernail she bit off. Last night’s downpour washed the muddy banks slippery as the metal slide in the playground. One, two, three, four silhouettes against the colorless sky, all with army experience, wearing camouflage, tramping grids …
Where exactly the giant egg was found is no longer remembered clearly. What is certain is that an egg of such a size had never been observed before and it dwarfed the sightseers who gathered to gawk at it. The immediate instinctive reaction was to attempt to crack it open right where it lay to …
On the drive into the city, I pass a crow with a bone in its beak. It perches atop a stop sign at the end of the Montlake exit from the 520 West. I can’t tell what kind of bone – maybe a turkey leg? Or maybe that’s just what I want to think, because …
I was born on the tail of a comet, a cluster of cosmic Chi, blind but seeing, cold and on fire, shooting in through my mother’s bedroom window. I smashed perfume bottles and pristine angel figurines, shattered time and space. My mother, still in bangs and barrettes, delivered me single-handedly by the light of a …