by Mimi Schwartz There is a place that existed before you came to it, closed with the secrets and complexities of history; and there is the place you experience in the present. —Eavan Boland He stands in front of the Hertz sign at the train station in Stuttgart, Germany, as we had arranged, and I recognize him right away from the… Read more →
by Tom Ireland In the dream I’m served by a Thai woman wearing a white plaster mask. She and I are the only people in a large hotel dining room: antique table settings, six or eight to a table, and white linen tablecloths. The masked woman folds herself around me from behind, but along with the pleasure of being held comes… Read more →
by Cynthia Miller Coffel All through my twenties, those playful, makeshift years when nothing seemed serious or settled, my friendship with David was the most important constant. I was building what I thought of as my teaching career, those young days, and I moved to a new place every two or three years: I worked in a daycare center in Live… Read more →
by Margaret Malone We wake up early, you and I, and go to the hospital. Anxious, empty stomachs. In the waiting room, we are the only ones. There is a television in the corner, volume low, and Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood is on. Changed into his sweater, Mr. Rogers shows us how a trumpet is made, takes us inside a manufacturing plant, bending the… Read more →
by Robert Kimber In the summer of 1955, the year my father quit his job with the Bankers Trust Company in New York City and bought Big Jim Pond Camps—the year, that is, when my father took a flier and did what he had always wanted to do, which was own and run a hunting and fishing camp in Maine—he discovered… Read more →
by Reesa Grushka 1 Some people ease into your life as if they have always been there and have only been out mailing a letter. Their chair is still warm. Some people know you, recognize in you immediately what most never see. In the presence of such people the word no becomes meaningless. So it was with Arieh. I had been feeling miserable… Read more →
