I walk through the long schoolroom questioning; A kind old nun in a white hood replies; The children learn to cipher and to sing, To study reading-books and history, To cut and sew, be neat in everything In the best modern way—the children's eyes In momentary...
Once teaching English in Ivory Coast you gave the ritual handshake all around and someone teased the texture of your palms: “Mais Monsieur, vous n’avez jamais cultivé la terre.” And not until walking the road from Tiebissou, laterite caking the skin, did you contemplate the rain-forgotten soil or...
In this life, there are stars and there are stunt doubles.
Before I became one of those fathers obsessed with memorizing his lines, making peace with the Big Director in the sky who doesn’t like ad libs, before all that, I was the star of my own...
The strongest boy in our high school on the edge of Detroit did not play sports—he would’ve had to cut his long blond Samson hair and put away his switchblade and stop smoking dope.
The gone-to-seed coaches who taught gym class hated him for the beauty they could...
1. Let's just save time—Yes I have seen Rain Man, The Miracle Worker, My Left Foot, or, more recently, The Theory of Everything. I wanna fuck Daniel Day Lewis too but can we not?
Prove that a person is / is not the smithy of his fate. Topic of an assigned essay I wrote for my brother. He did math homework for me, the smithy of my fate in the hard sciences. And I forged for him a C in Polish class. A difficult...
Udowodnij, że człowiek jest / nie jest kowalem własnego losu. Temat jednej ze szkolnych rozprawek, które pisałam za brata. On robił za mnie matmę. Był kowalem mojego losu w zakresie nauk ścisłych. Ja wykuwałam dla niego dostateczny z polaka. Trudna sztuka: napisać najwyżej na cztery mniej, nie wzbudzić podejrzeń. On też musiał...
The book from the archive whispers with handwriting. A gold pen shines the name of every man, his every hand that closed it shut. If girls ever read, they were crossed out. The gilded slashes still burn the wounded. In the right environment, they say, every cell...
Ayumi never spoke in class, never responded to anyone who talked to her, and I tried talking to her once, no reply, but I loved her fleecy hair, her pants too short, not in fashion, ahead of her time in...