Half Sister

Since you’re going to Texas anyway, she says,
You should burn down my house.
Burn it down, and I’ll give you a thousand dollars.
I think about a brilliance of orange hallways,
televisions boiled to resin, a plume of great distance.
But how to do it? How do you be circumstantial,
how do you be innocent?
I think of watching from across the street as
Rob Hoffman put his heels into Ryan Cutts’ gut
for a few crumpled dollars when we were boys,
the Mexican boys who put me down like that
for my dollars that same year.
My half-sister and I didn’t grow up together;
there are many years between us, and
we never knew each other as kids.
Which is why, now that I’ve agreed to be
the trigger man in her insurance fraud,
we sit across from each other not knowing
which of us is joking, and which is truly capable.

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Give Us A Steady Diet of Literature

Fatten up. That’s what we’re doing. We brought a tempeh concoction for lunch but instead were met with doughnuts, Christmas cookies, and lemon pound cake. Not bad. Of course, it helps when your day job involves approving loans. Do such fringe benefits make you want to quit the literary world for the world of banking? We hope not. Stick with your happiness. And stick with us. We’ve got David Mamet’s new play on NPR (spoiler alert: David Alan Grier went to Yale’s School of Drama). Next we move from the stage to the screen, where The Rumpus takes on Up In The Air. If you’re like us, and you feasted on the novel Master and Margarita, you might enjoy a new translation of The Golden Calf. But like an expanding waistline, fear lurks in the feast: The Independent covers lingual doom and the LA Times talks fairy tales, which offer a scary, delicious look into the past. [Stomach growls] – Andrew Geer

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