My Stump Speech

Good morning, voters. Just last night I signed my name without pausing to 200 pieces of pending legislation, each of them crafted to meet a specific human need, but I couldn’t sign the 201st. It was a crafty piece of legislation too, I’m told,

Rosa Parks Gives Up Her Seat on the Bus

Yes, we understood it was a provocative topic. That’s why we chose it. To provoke thought. Next.

No, the question is not racist. It’s a speculation about race. Let’s be clear about that. Next.

Well, because it’s frankly ridiculous to base admissions entirely on test scores.

Good Girls

We all know the good girls and the men they travel with. I saw them this morning at the pet market and didn’t think anything of it. They were receiving instruction, yes, that is often the case; it is an education for them to be among people.

How You Will Live Your Life

The kids formed a new government yesterday after the briefest of campaigns. “Who’s bigger?” was one campaign pledge. “I’ll tell Mom,” was another. Ballots were cast verbally, sometimes face-down in the carpet, and claims of voter intimidation were resolved internally by the poll boss.

Confinement

Just as the rich man has nothing and no man who has never lived in prison can be free, my jailers were wrong to promise me solitary when the fertile air all around must vibrate with songs

Politics of Beauty

Either she was magnificent and the world makes sense in a deeply unfair but ordinary sort of way, or her looks, which strike everyone who sees her as a force of nature, are the reasonable norm and the rest of the world falls short.

Spread Dead Fred

VERMONT, 1998—Fred Tuttle, 79, Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives, wants you to vote for the other guy.

Simple Lessons of War

I teach fifth grade, nothing complicated: slavery, ratios and proportions, why the good side always prevails in war. Half my students at the Army base are children of Second Cavalry, currently deployed;

Red Water

He shows his hands as bidden. Across each palm, and flecking the edges also of his bare soles, doily patterns of lesion and wart, the arsenic array. His hands outstretched toward the inspector, palms up, thumbs east and west,

Resistance

They were torches to our matchsticks. They ate our city’s oxygen and everything else on the menu. In the early days of the occupation, we caught rare glimpses of them at the opera, the better cafes, at the racetrack calculating odds.