The Merchant of Venice: For Love or Money
“The world is still deceiv´d with ornament./ In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt/ But, being season´d with a gracious voice,/ Obscures the show of evil? In religion,/ What damned error but some sober brow/ Will bless it and approve it with a text,/ Hiding the grossness with fair ornament?/ There is no [vice] […]
I Exude in Partials
A strong wind blew across the avenue. It felt like a December gust, but Kass had lost track of the months long ago. It sliced into his face as he twisted and turned and tried in vain to prolong his current slumber. He soon arose, stricken with restlessness. He staggered across the littered sidewalk, sidestepping […]
Breathing Trouble
Five bottles of dollar-fifty beer had come and gone when I saw her glide into the bar and sit at a booth behind me. Above the bar, the Budweiser horses pulled their plastic wagons of beer into infinity. I saw her in my peripheral vision, smooth and solitary, wearing a white T-shirt tucked into faded […]
Kiko
Kiko says a broken vessel doesn’t cling to the remaining droplets, but I strive to believe it’s so. “Anything newly broken savors only the dew. It has nothing else to offer,” I explain, waving my tawny arms with the thick webs of hair in an angel’s arch above my chin. “I relinquished the dew when […]
Everything I Have Is Yours
“You´ll never guess who called me this afternoon,” I can recall my mother saying. It was dinnertime, and she was at the stove spooning something lumpy from a frying pan into Tupperware. We–my father, my brother Lester, Bradley Willis, and I–were at the opposite end of the kitchen, sitting around a pink and gray formica […]
