Ten Sentence Movie Reviews and Other Mussings
Icarus’ sister exists only in living stone, the watchful daughter of the craftsman in the middle of his own labyrinth, once his prized creation, placed in the prime line of his drafts, design, eye of his genius, now a relic existing in a dusty nowhere cobweb corner stained with Minotaur blood, watching her fleshy father…
These are the things he scribbles in the little white paper of his brain: catch the movement of passing shadows in a window; search the clouds for the feathers of a robin’s wing; listen in the spaces of music for the laughter of angels in hiding. These are the things she knows today, yesterday…
Catacombs are full of bones snuggling in the disgrace of others. Hipbones piled on top of skulls, the absence of lower jaws denying the departed a smile, the eternal existential joke of insulting the living with the knowledge of their ultimate end. Femur, skull, femur skull is the monotonous pattern of the Paris catacombs.…
At lunchtime pigeons and pinstripes dance with Rockette syncopation in front of Radio City following the lead of thirty balloons encased in vinyl tugged down the 50th Street station. A chauffeured limousine pops out a freshly groomed and leashed Pomeranian seeking reunion with her dowager owner getting purple locks and cuticles nearby. At…
A fossil in foam, five toes under a formed sole, preserves the flight of a thousand border treks. A layer of thermite and blood settles the right pad of every hastily fled soul, a rusty preservation of the ash of those who were enflamed. Their left clod is encased with the dirt of…
Tiananmen Square is a clean place today. Everything is swept before it can dirty in the history of place. No sign exists of the tanks that rolled, the man in front of them, the blood that flowed like red sorghum seeds. The cracked bricks have been replaced with new tera cotta tiles. …
In the stillness of a teacup morning in Amsterdam a crowd with yellow stars query each other, a collapse of suitcases and stuffed pillow cases huddled under a gas lamp at a corner square, while those in the stories above slowly turn away. A few days before the yellow stars were twenty-one children with…
On her last ride on the Arkansas river, she watched the world turn crooked, all the hickory shading yellow, their leaf tears forming sunny arrows in the flow, nuts falling in the glide, bringing smoker memories of hams cooked under their roast, red maples tapped for their syrup, the unharvested loblolly pines dropping their branches…
Trupie Pole, this Field of Death is called in the old Slavic tongue, shares its grief with the ruins of the Catholic Church, its relics long since relocated to the hollowed knots of oaks that populate a crooked forest. Stick scarecrows, their bag heads floating phantoms, protect the border. Even the trees grow stunted…
