Philip Levine

We crossed in rough seas. I stayed on deck with Teddy, my youngest who had paled in the first minutes. All pluck, he clenched his teeth and stared straight ahead as the waves broke over the bow and showered us. Suddenly the second pillar loomed up out of the mist and I felt his hand […]

Behind the Plymouth assembly plant on East Warren, a clump of tattered pin oaks and frail maples. Sunday morning, late March, the worshippers in dark groups of two and three walked the long block from the bus stop. Low clouds dispersed, a watery sun rose slowly toward 9 A.M. shedding its light into standing pools […]

In the basement of the two-story house on Monterey at age eight I am plotting the next move against Franco. I sit under an overhead light, the map before me, studying the road ahead while my militia gathers outside the ancient shipyards of Atarazanes to march up the Ramblas and parade across the Plaza Catalunya […]

Renamed Efraim after the Lord of Light, he was given for his thirteenth birthday a small roan and pranced in the roadway raising dust in the eyes of young mothers whose curses, tame and traditional, did no one harm . His brother Ismail walked at his side. A man of some years, but merely a […]

When the shift was over he went out and stood under the night sky a mile from the darkened baseball stadium and waited for the bus. He could taste nickel under his tongue, and when he swiped the back of his hand across his nose he caught the smell of hydrochloric acid. There were clouds […]