Happiness Is Very Hard (Is It)
If pain secretly visits and sleeps over
In a zigzagging night
The body, like a habit-driven curve,
Will become bitter and stiff at the right time
Or it will try to lie flat like …
[an excerpt from our Winter 2020 issue]
x.
A rhombus
turning
in a mind.
Fire
without a body,
eating:
air into air.
Looking
without a body.
Sun up.
x.
Reminder of a body,
thinking
READ A CONVERSATION WITH MAUD CASEY ABOUT THIS STORY HERE
The female hysteric represents an extraordinarily complicated type, of a completely particular and excessively versatile nature, remarkable for her spirit of duplicity, lying, and simulation. With an essentially perverse …
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She takes the test on her birthday.
“You’ll want a baby right away, won’t you?” he’d joked three months earlier, before their August wedding.
She’d demurred, but she knew she was lying. By November, there it is: a growth, a …
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There are diamonds inside
Although the Leonid meteor shower is not a rare occurrence, it is rare that I will be awake to see it. The news has been reporting that the meteor shower is coming, that a certain province …
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Back to School Day and my sister has been dead one year, ten months. This is how you get to the other side. We’ve been moving into a new world. When pressed against
your palm, the flesh of a good …
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Is man no more than this?
—King Lear
From twelve floors up, looking across the roofs,
we get a glimpse of Jersey, glimpse of Hudson,
evening sky. Window wide open. Breeze.
My folks—my mother’s ninety-three and blind,
my father’s …
before revealing the rabbit, after she reaches into you
like the magician into the hat, the will
of touch descending into night, past the stain
-ed mural against the brick, past any tulip or fallen
rose, the lesser pleasures—no, further, …
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