February 2012
5 posts
2 tags
Swim for your Life
There’s a scene in Wes Craven’s “Last House on the Left” in which a teenage girl, only just victimized in the worst imaginable ways, runs barefoot and half-naked through a thicket of woods. We run along with her and our hearts leap with hope as she launches herself off the rocky shore, head first, into a calm, denim-blue lake. We know she is a competitive swimmer, so we...
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Foregone Under Honey
That woman opened
Her mouth,
Foregone under honey,
and the rough Trading began.
Domiciling spelled permissible
grasped at felicity
Recast the girl and
Sated all the zone.
Until
An alliterative gradualism
Uncollected, shook water from ears
blistered with enterprise.
Dwight Okita's poem, to honor "Remembrance Day"
In Response to Executive Order 9066:
All Americans of Japanese Descent Must Report to Relocation Centers
Dear Sirs: Of course I’ll come. I’ve packed my galoshes and three packets of tomato seeds. Denise calls them love apples. My father says where we’re going they won’t grow.
I am a fourteen-year-old girl with bad spelling and a messy room. If it helps any, I will tell...
“Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been...”
– Joan Didion, in her 1976 New York Times article, “Why I Write,” (full PDF), which begins: “Of course I stole the title from this talk, from George Orwell. One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write… I stole the title not only because the words sounded right but because...
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Best Case
It was always the waking up that surprised her. Not because she didn’t claim ownership over her own reckless behavior, but because she found that a little sleep, even forty minutes or so, produced just enough conscious distance that she was startled by the evidence around her. That evidence, usually in the form of vomit (or worse) on her clothes, or receipts, or other sundry items that made it...