After graduate school I hung around another year and drove a cab for Iowa City Yellow Cab. The cab was a boat, a Chevrolet Caprice wagon. I could have put a mattress in the back and lived in it.

For hours we listened to it on the radio, and not once did Larry Phoebus say a word. A woman walked into a classroom of a school a couple of towns over and started shooting. She killed an eight-year-old boy and ­wounded five ­other kids.

Nate Zamost took that week off school. We wondered what he did those long days other than the funeral, which didn’t take more than a few hours. The Zamosts lived in one of those houses just across the fence from Foley’s Pond. Nate’s sister, Barbara—they called her Babs—slid under the chain-link and waddled down to the water.

Sunday and the beautiful and sleek and unsmiling and too good for us Mavala Shikongo is gone. Second to last single woman teacher at an all boy's boarding school so far in the veld even the baboons 

“I’ve got my own numbers that no longer—432-5181. 432-4474. 432-8719.”

On reading Marianne Boruch during Covid-19

I’m not going to do it, I’m not going to defend the short story again, I’m tired of it