i
By the shadowless, lion-bluff of Pigeon
Island, you have gone swimming, a clear
afternoon, children’s faint play noise ring
in the yard
It was a boy named Pierre Powell
that was in charge of the atlas
in the cabinet. He also ended days
by shaking the iron bell from principal
William’s window, a work we grudged
him for very little
Photo by Jeep Wheat
I write twice a week in the Watson Room at Forbes, the public library in Northampton, Massachusetts. It’s a simple space, dedicated, according to a brass plaque, to the memory of Julia and Rosa Watson, who made generous bequests. There are built-in cabinets with locked glass doors, full of old books, all bound in the same black with gold letters on their spines. Statistics of Coal. Geology for Beginners. Select British Poets, Hazlitt. Don Juan, Byron. Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Scott, volumes 1, 2 and 3. There are six long, wide windows with green blinds, which look out over the library parking lot. The cars and the people seem vivid but far away.
The voice came from a white utility van parked alongside the campus tennis courts. “Hey baby,” it said, in the sort of voice that comes from vans.
Right away, I knew it was the skirt. I tugged at it and looked all around—across the empty student parking lot where I sometimes rollerbladed; at the drab, squashed little dorm that had the best vending machine; at the ivy-choked library where I’d recently borrowed the first season of Twin Peaks, which had gotten me so excited I’d filled two whole sheets of college-ruled loose-leaf about the way the wobbly ceiling fan in my dad’s faculty office might at any second crash murderously to the floor. I looked everywhere but at the voice.
By SETH PERLOW
Dear future self, when you read this
will they have abolished the yellow
light, or merely changed its function?
Where I come from, we have a color
for Sort-of-stop, but no way to express
Sort-of-go.
A family friend, one of AP’s first female photojournalists, used to cover news in Florida. One day there was a kidnapping. She had a hunch that she could catch a crucial part of the action at the girl’s parents’ house, so she staked it out, waiting in the car, until the parents emerged. She captured them on film, then chased the car in which the FBI whisked them away. When her hatchback couldn’t keep up with government issue, she quit while ahead and drove to a motel, where she developed her prints in the bathtub.
It was not death, for I stood up,
And all the dead lie down.
—Emily Dickinson
Late
last night
[on way back
from hotel]
I walked
into the mouth
of a long empty alley
full of dark liminalities—
Around Times Square in New York City – images of the familiar cityscape where millions of people pass daily, taken at odd hours. This is an attempt to reveal a different state of that place, a place still permeated with blinking neon but devoid of its participants, left to itself. A surreal performance that continues without its audience.
My parents used to have a grey miniature schnauzer named Jacques. While his brother Pablo was big and black and thick, Jacques was wiry and small. Over the years, his runtiness and Pablo’s brotherly abuse (stealing food, mounting his haunches) made him kind of squirrely. If he had been a human he would have been diagnosed and put on medication, but Jacques was only a dog, and so he was allowed to lead his neurotic, pampered life.
By DELIA VELASQUEZ and JULIA LICHTBLAU
I met Delia Velasquez in the late 1990s through her daughter, Ericka Rubin, who was a friend of our babysitter. My daughter, Zoë, and son, Gabriel, were adopted from Guatemala, and she and her husband, Alberto, both from Guatemala, were curious to meet us. They had three sons, and we became friends. One blistering July day in 2005, I brought Gabriel over to play. Ericka, Doña Delia, and I sat in their Brooklyn kitchen, talking and cooking, and the subject of marriage came up. I mentioned my grandmother was married at fourteen.
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