A Column of The Miramichi Reader
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 …
I’m taking the short cut through the park when I see him under the stand of poplars. He is staring into the bushes, a dog leash minus its dog looped around his left wrist. I stroll across, swishing leaves with the toes of my boots, loud enough for him to hear. I don’t like creeping …
She’s showering with the curtain open and then steps out and towels her hair her large breasts swaying as she puts one leg then the other on the tub to be dried off and she chooses her thong makes up her face with her painting kit and slips on her dress without a bra and …
I’m standing at the south rim of the Grand Canyon taking photographs of florid purple striations, of undulating rock walls that sink to alarming depths. But it is almost checkout time at my hotel, and I want to take a tub and use all their emollients, a habit my ex deplored. When a young couple …
I stay in my apartment on Pine Street with black-out drapes on my windows and triple locks on the door. I go out when it’s absolutely necessary, for groceries mostly, and when I come back, I say a prayer and I tiptoe in. I don’t want to find Mother at the stove, her shimmery shoulder …