River Styx 21: Family Album by William H. Gass

River Styx 21: Family Album by William H. Gass

Excerpt:
"These album pages are as lightless as oblivion. Feel the soft absorbent darkness? I hated pasting the pale faces of my photographs on such a surface. I was like lowering them away. So here is the gravespace of the painfully remembered. When I was a child I would stretch a blanket up over the headboard of my bed and pretend its darkness protected me from every other darkness: closets, drawers, pockets, purses, forests, basements, night sky, caves. Now I've drawn these sheets around me as if fearful of the boogie. Trapped with me in this tent, they catch your tantalizing whiff. Here I make my movie of your body, breath by breath."

© 1986 Big River Association (River Styx Magazine). All rights reserved by the author.