The Queen is Dead
Rosemary Harp
Two years later, I fell in love with a boy whose devotion to The Smiths matched my own.
Two years later, I fell in love with a boy whose devotion to The Smiths matched my own.
The first line in the Medieval Times employee handbook is “The King always wins” even though really it’s the Champion Knight who wins and every move of the nightly joust is scripted to ensure that always happens...
Anthony was my reason for everything ... for South Park, for Tupac, for horror movies, for music that sounded like screaming, for my parents' vodka, my sister’s mascara, for all the girls I put down.
What we really wanted was to be older. What we really wanted was for something to happen, take us away from Florida and into the rest of our lives, but that doesn't happen for teenagers, not so much, and so we stood and waited.
Civil War Day was a staple at Reginald Middle School, implemented somewhere in the shady patriotism of the Reagan era before carrying through as tradition.
The air before me
is the flavor of
an oat cake popsicle.
Or a shoe box.
Or the water sports
I’m not doing.
So I sign for
a prescription
while all the world
is water sporting
in
On my last night in Zhenjiang, the three other laowai and I—each of us western foreigners: three upstaters and a guy from Toronto—walk the condominium-lined miles out to the banks of the Yangtze river.
Fifty cents for tickets in the bleachers—then. Fifty cents a railroad car to Pittsburgh.
A “marvel” they’d called it. Three tiers of steel, the façade terracotta, the balls off
the deck, bouncing.
Summers to Harridge, April 20, 1950: I am writing to inform you of the changes in the Washington ball park. It is rather difficult to explain but I will try to give you a picture.
Maybe you
By late ‘88 I had mastered Eck’s three-quarter delivery...
Well, if you're reading lips, you'll hear some words that are not necessarily used on family TV.
I kissed my father’s cheek for good luck in the firehouse driveway.
The year everyone was hitting home runs, Barry Bonds made lunch with his arms.
The victim was the leadoff hitter for the Matsushima Baseball Ocean Temple Gods in the bottom of the first.
Letterman wore khakis and the camera angled up his crotch. I watched every night or set my VCR to record on the rare occasion I left my apartment.
His gravesite at Holy Cross Cemetery brought a lump to my throat.
Just mid-February but a day like summer
I saw Candy the next time I went out. And the time after that. And the time after that.