i. The Ocean Gilded crests and metallic prisms are shattered now, transmuted now: emerald to tanzanite to sapphire to silver in accordance with nor’eastern alchemy. Like birth, the horizon becomes distinct bodies; you watch as sea splits…
Content Notes Contains discussion of suicide. In a Lonely Place A dear friend recently said to me, “You get the thing where enough ‘lonely’ feels like ‘death.’” I’m not sure…
Mortals, my father says, come twice before they finally hitthe eternal rest button. By this he meant, a man is to two gravestones,that a man drowned in the slave ship…
but once, after Sunday service, she heard the sexton say that there are places where the dead traverse a river after death, paying a boatsman to ferry them across the water.
She took a dip in the healing watersof Lethe, rubbed the ashes awayuntil her arms were pale and gray with cold. She stepped out, and then began the procession of…
In 1524, German Renaissance painter Barthel Bruyn the Elder completed a bridal portrait depicting an attractive young woman, Margaretha von Mochau, offering a single carnation to her new husband—a symbol…
On either side the river lie long fields of barley and of rye. In Elaine’s mirror, they suckle the horizon like dead oceans.
sea girls are wrestling red tigerfish while Margaretgathers upwet bones in a basketwith a howlof wind blowingcicada shadethrough dank and damp cornersof deep-mouthedocean caves her oars dip in and out…
