In an already classic episode of Black Mirror, called “Arkangel” and directed by Jodie Foster, a single mother has her daugh- ter grafted with a cerebral implant connected to a screen. The system, known as Arkangel, allows Marie to monitor Sarah’s every action, and also to suppress stimuli that might cause her daughter distress. The…
The air is sharp with dust: it’s hard to breathe. The sky’s scraped white with it, the light turns gold And ominous. I cough and cough and cough. It blows each year from Africa, a seethe That Pollocks the parked cars with ochre, rust, The powdered pigments for the nimbus on The icon of a…
When I was small, my grandmother, who taught piano, told me someday I would learn to “read” music; I was astonished! What ogres, what emperors, what gingerbread, what coffins of glass? Perched on five telephone wires, birds noted their gibberish, like an unspooled Phaistos disk. When grown-ups crescendo-ed overhead, when discords tensed for the felted…
Even though she has set down The unwieldy entablature And walked back into her life, Her posture, Her disheveled intricate coiffure, Betray preoccupation. Preparing dinner, she slices The fluted celery stalk into drums, The mushrooms into ionic capitals. She is too old to be young anymore, The moonlight petrifies. She has left…
Hat on the bed, A peacock feather Dragged indoors From the blue-eyed weather, Reflection smashed, A baker’s dozen, Chain letter from An estranged cousin, The bumbershoot Bloomed in the hall, The ladder’s lintel, The owl’s call, The horseshoe’s frown, The salt knocked over & not tossed across The left shoulder, A…
(with a nod to X.J. Kennedy) The rope that makes of air a sphere, Or else a grin from ear to ear, Is something earth-bound feet must clear When the parabola swings round. Right before the snapping sound, You have to float above the ground. The trick is tempo, neither slow Nor…
On the gloomy days, when the American catastrophes are too much to bear, I turn to my bookcases for solace and even something like friendship, and the shelves throw a welcoming arm over me. The bookcases are organized on the principle of no principle, and nowhere among them is there a section dedicated strictly to…
I watched too much Turner Classic Movies at an early age. It can be a burden: all my celebrity crushes have been dead for at least twenty years, and to this day I think that marcelled hair looks normal. But my obsession with films of the 1930s and 1940s can also instill another bias in…
Fyodor Dostoevsky published the first installment of The Brothers Karamazov in February, 1879. The novel was the culmination of a decade of ideological strife, during which Dostoevsky had noted a steady slide toward populism. Socialism, the passion of Dostoevsky’s youth, was an enthusiasm still on the march. The author of The Brothers Karamazov was a…
Next time her skull is sliced open, she must have a mind limber as rubber, bending to the pain. Under the bright lights of the icy theater she will melt, allowing the saw’s buzz to fade into the sound of the surgeon entering her interior, surveying the field of tumors for the bad one. When…
She wanted a crypt like the temple of Dendur, an enormous monolith unshakeable as their marriage. He favored the granite sarcophagus gaily decorated with Victorian swirls and oak leaf cornices. She wanted poplars tall and straight—leafy and shameless as Italian trees of summer, if sadly deciduous. He preferred cypresses, their constancy through the seasons: shrubs—yew…
1. Precocious in her dotage, she teeters like a top unravelling, now spinning, now faltering, now lunging across living room carpets, over William Morris tendrils and Bokara medallions, past the leather sofa and beyond, arriving at the south window. She stoops over the hope chest with her watering can, drenching the amaryllis, dotting orchids and jade with ice, then pruning the cactus…
