Coming together ( Read more... )

( by Richard Siken )

“& isn’t the heart ( Read more... )

There was a book series that I thumbed through too often when I was much younger. The pages are all yellowed and parched now, and thinned out at the corners. It was called The Chalet School. A woman moves out to the Austrian Alps for the delicate constitution (the exact words) of her younger sister, and establishes a girls' school. Over the years, ( Read more... )

“A bouquet of clumsy words: you know that place between sleep and awake where you’re still dreaming but it’s slowly slipping? I wish we could feel like that more often. I also wish I could click my fingers three times and be transported to anywhere I like. I wish that people didn’t always say ‘just wondering’ when you both know there was a real ( Read more... )

"The street was hot at three and hotter still at four, the April dust seeming to enmesh the sun and give it forth again as a world-old joke forever played on an eternity of afternoons. But at half past four a first layer of quiet fell and the shades lengthened under the awnings and heavy foliaged trees. In this heat nothing mattered. All life was ( Read more... )

What We Once Needed To KnowJosh Rathkamp ( Read more... )

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Just when I thought I couldn't love "Clair de Lune" even more, I stumbled upon this version. The beginning sears me every time. The hesitance, the yearning, the trembling that skims along skeletons of air. A thousand promises tucked in a breath, held until it bursts forth in a cascade. It flows away gently and dances upon starlight. It hovers, and ( Read more... )

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( Photograph by Andrea Gibson )

The heat is spreading across my abdomen, from the whirring fans of an overworked and under-cleaned laptop. It is like a lumbering star, the one left behind by the sparkling upstarts and makes up for its torpidity with warmth- the equivalent of a dopey grin. I have been trying to lose weight: maybe if there is less of me, there would be less of ( Read more... )