Author Archives: Haley

1964   They found someone who knew someone, in Brooklyn where it would be done. They knew she wasn’t far along. He gave her cash. She went by train while he stayed home with 1-6. The cots and cribs were … Read More

  In the temporary trailer park made permanent, we marry, look for work, give birth. We fix up trucks or let them rust for months, propped up on blocks in the punishing dust. There’s little joy and nothing grows except … Read More

  Old cart slumped over its wheels, a cat’s cradle of cobwebs in what was the manger—and a shanty town of pick-up-stick cages, each containing a frantic thrush. We have disturbed them, coming in. Raymond knows each bird by its … Read More

  A steer hung from its hocks, stream of plasma under my boots, water-thinned. The butcher works rhythmically. Hands pale and firm. The steer is a hulking, swiveling shadow. The butcher opens it slowly. There are those who see colors … Read More

  These are the things that do tend towards miniaturization— shore towns, ocean liners, fitful poetry, extreme weather, city of Cambridge, the mild. All of a summer day from Magazine Beach, you see the sky is divided in two, and … Read More

  The road from Louisburgh through an intersection toward Killeen, got pokier and stonier with wreckage and walls and boatloads of early, Mweelrea Mountains looming in fog, the ocean thrown from the west and from the south. This was moving … Read More