BERGMAN’S SUMMER WITH MONIKA

At work, she’s a game
guys play between loading boxes,
her home, cramped, noisy.

She and her lover sail
under a high arch
into an archipelago,

summer brief,
a match blown out.
Food gone, she returns

to the mainland
with child.  To the dark.
Winter.  Bored,

she looks for men.
Sun, jailed in snow–
others raise her daughter.

MOONFLOWER ON THE PORCH

I dream I’m with another man.
Who I meet in the Boscov’s
furniture section
on a bubblegum-colored couch.

I say I already have a guy.  He says
so what?  Startled, I wake up,

you still sleeping.  Life
gets normal again.  Cats.  Coffee.
The Dave Clark Five a needle drop away.
A late summer moonflower’s
ghost on the porch.

PESSOA MEETS WHITMAN ON HEAVEN’S PATIO

Good evening, friend.  How long
have you been here?  Over 100 years?
I understand you.  And
misunderstand as much.

We’re comrades.
Didn’t we sleep together once,
share a dream, ecstatic,
scary?  I wanted it to return,
but you were revising in New Jersey.

Have you seen God yet?
I … Read More »

Carmen María Machado

Junot Díaz’s This is How You Lose Her as a Confessional Text

The confessional text—either an author baring his own soul, or a fictional character coming clean about his or her particular version of events—has a long history, from The Confessions of St. Augustine to Nabokov’s Lolita. In the spirit of this genre comes Junot Díaz’s second short story collection, This is How You Lose Her, a sequence of bright, tight stories revolving around love’s many complications—infidelity, pregnancy, dissolving marriages, wounded families, the fact that true love is rare and can be lost forever. The sun in this particular universe is Yunior (of Díaz’s previous collection, Drown), a geeky jackass whose two most consistent qualities are cheating on his girlfriends and an unflappable optimism that he can get away with anything. The first story … Read More »