Secretly Ironic

I may have posted this before, but it’s still amazing. “I was raised like a veal in the Orthodox Jewish town of Monsey, New York, where it was forbidden to eat veal together with dairy….”

A poet’s trick for getting unstuck, although it probably applies well enough to other art: Take a stack of index cards cut in half, or blank business cards, or something similar. Write a single word on each one: About 80 to 90 percent concrete nouns, with a handful of verbs and adjectives, maybe a couple [...]

i. The Epiphyte Sprouting from folds of trunk and branch, it reaches up to sun and down to soil. The narrow tendrils twist and choke to gain support. The scaffold dead, the vines persist upright, supplant the frame that formed them. ii. The Brood Parasite Before she killed her stepsisters, she’d memorized their mother’s plumage [...]

God bless the pretty girls in skirt-suits and sneakers office shoes in plastic bags swaying up the subway stairs. I stare; they look away. I follow them up outdoors up through the park up indoors up among the flickering cubicles — We’re all alone on this train.