Sublime

nisei

My heart was skipping in my throat. I knew that anger. How had I managed to find it in Ohio?

Until I talked to her, I could only imagine Cha’s New York as a shadowy abstraction of a city, a Gotham of unlit steel and windswept empty boulevards.

“Flotsam

Even now, at seventeen—high school graduate, mistress of her fate, and a ten-dollar-a-week file clerk in the very Forty-seventh Street lawyer’s office where Helen was a fifteen-dollar-a-week typist—as she sat on Helen’s bed and watched Helen primp for a party, the memory hurt. There was no consolation in the thought that not now and not then would

Tovah treated him to the smile she once bestowed upon the creative writing professor who told her that some people were meant to write poetry and others, like Tovah, to treasure it.