Prose, Poetry, and Art since 1956
The Girl Who Talked to Paintings For Katharine Millet, the original subject of John Singer Sargent’s Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose Painting, 1885-1886 I. Syllable by syllable, my father’s words bore into me. Metal-edged, spiked, they always lodged in the most tender tissues— curled on the floor at the base of my bed, I made myself small as a seed. I pressed my cheek against the green…
I decided to give the Museum of Palpable Art one last go before I gave it up as a bad job. The first two times had been busts, plain and simple. And when I had handed back my tangled EEG device to the docent after the first failed trip, beyond exasperated, she had looked at me with an unbearable sort of pity. “It doesn’t work…
The tree outside the barbershop was struck down sometime last night, its Siamese boughs wrenched from each other in violent divorce and the weaker flung to the ground— someone, some official someone, has hedged the afflicted area with yellow cautionary tape, as if to fence in the tragedy, or demarcate the location of a corpse— and misting from the open wood is fragrance: xylem and…
When she was a girl she dragged her doll by the hair and scorched her feet on a hot slide. She crawled in the basement with a cottonmouth snake. Even her front tooth dangled from its root. When she was a girl North Georgia and Kentucky couldn’t tether, she was flown across an ocean she’d always know in the following years by its face pressed…
the three of us turn right. Past the iron fence wrapped in raspberry, thick with bee song and morning glory’s violet, the tree’s jaw and its opera throat hitting all the right notes. Past the in-between, the alley with its arched back and vine-covered belly, full of ivy and other tender wrappings. Until, yes— there. The brick house and its moss steps, its spires a…