John P. O'Grady

A friend composed a “snapshot inventory” of his dining room table. He enumerated the various items—a veritable catalog of wonders it was—then challenged his friends to have a look at their own dining room...

Here, along the fringe of living memory, hints and suggestions are all that remain: a rusty blue wheelbarrow, an open grave, a smoking mountain of garbage, the riding school at the edge of the...

One time David Rothenberg and I went to the end of Broadway. It’s in a place now called Sleepy Hollow. There we found the conclusion of automobile manufacturing in America. Nobody was around to...

First word: Ill. She spells it out: “George is ill. I-L-L.” The sun and warmth of a September day, a long stretch of grass, woods rising in the distance at the edge of the...

Warm and humid afternoon in the Land of Rip Van Winkle. New roof being installed on the house just up the hill. The roofers have their boombox cranked  all the way up. The music...

How ordinary the Great Mystery: to escape the commonplace by going nowhere.

I have no hammock. I see no bronze butterflies. No field of sunlight viewed between a couple of pines, cowbells tinkling in the distance. None of that poetic horse crap for me. Just a table in...

The new parking lot is already becoming sketchy. The yellow lines laid down just last year are fading. You can barely read them anymore. Soon they’ll be gone altogether, erased by sun. Drivers then...

Brick Church was the name of an appliance store on Main Street in New Jersey. Its namesake—an old redbrick house of worship—stood next door. Its congregation was in slow decline. The appliance store, on...