Eric Darton is a New York City-based writer. His works include Free City, WW. Norton, 1996; republished by Dalkey Archive, 2021 and Divided We Stand, Basic Books, 1999, 2010 (second edition). His fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, New England Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Chimurenga and 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11, NYU Press, 2002. Darton is a founding editor of Cable Street (formerly Witty Partition), a triannual review of world literature and was fiction editor of American Letters & Commentary. He has taught writing at the Goddard College MFA in Writing Program, and currently at New York University.

You Got It

The Palace of Sufficiency: what’s it like?

There would be breath, in all its dimensionality. There would be reciprocal heave to and cast away.

There would be flotsam and sink-some, chutes and ladders and banded serpents sin y con sueños. Crows and snow geese blackening the sky. There would be mushrooms with the properties of sibylline – no, psilocy–been-there-but-don’t-tell-anyone; lacy drawers of experience – check your perceptions with the bouncer.

Every six months or so Persephone makes her appearance, and sings with Orpheus till the cows leave the barn for home, home on the – or homing like the pigeons on the roof of 20 Cornelia who taught you all you needed to know about the constancy of couples and fated parings, and were never scared off by the Lady of Pompeii bells which in any case hadn’t erupted during the whole of the anthropocene – so much less an epoch than an epoxy – neither precisely an era nor a ça ira.

Everything will be fine the pigeons coo to themselves but they let you join them: Fine fine the girls of Leroy Street: fine fine the goddess fountain: fine fine the red-tailed sky: fine fine the so-called square: fine fine the cornice line.