On Risk in Writing
“Think about your family, you dolt.” This is the kind of mean-spirited personal attack that every blogger dreads. It was left four years ago on a blog post I wrote about the risks my wife and I were taking when we decided that I would leave the corporate world and she would quit her teaching…
Read MoreFat Ankles
As a baby, my cousin Martha Ray urinated an open safety pin without hurting herself. Now she wants me to come to a funeral. Be here by two-thirty, she says. I’ve found cowgirl boots in one-size-only—not mine. I can’t get my ankle into the left one. I wonder if I can tell Martha Ray I’ve…
Read MoreMiss Eleanor
Forgive me, Ma’am, I don’t know your name. You could be a Mildred or a Delores, a Mary or a Faye, but I’ve taken to calling you Eleanor, since I believe it suits you. I don’t know if this is true, but to me it has become so. I have no idea what you look…
Read MoreThree Poems
Fridays Fixed in the yearbook of self, she saysshe’s never mattered. I go to her house, empty-handed; leave with cash, maybe some peas or a lamp. Friday again—again we beginwriting her life. In the careful geometryof kitchen and desk, I watch her eyes stay gray. From thin lips, she shakes outconceits, the worriesthat hide between…
Read MoreThree Poems
Chicago, October I should ignore the empty cityin my gut that still billboardsyour name. What fictionswe create for each other,the epic piles of proselining our beds. Twice I’ve asked you to leaveand kept the door openbehind you. I couldn’t standthe sound of the lock clickingits steadfast no, when wehave always been so maybe and bad…
Read MoreThe Grasses Are Weeping
This is a story that needs to be told, though I’ve hesitated in the telling, because at times it seems surreal as a dream, memories drifting in vague waves of euphoria and despair; the greens and golds of the landscape blending with the stark blackness of night. Black without stars, without moon, so pitch it’s…
Read MoreThree Poems
Post– Veni, vidi, vici. – Julius Caesar My skin in the Sahel, here, brownerthan it’s ever been, informed by sand,the assaulting mirror of the Atlantic& an unreasonable sub-Saharan sun. But it’s still an artifice, some wound I—& the rest of humanity—lungefingers & fists into again & again.My white is so deep children sing songs of…
Read MoreBotany for Non-Majors
Orchid species of the Ophrys genus are noted for a process called pseudocopulation, or sexual deception, which completes their reproductive cycle. In sexual deception, the blossom looks so like an insect that the male of the species tries to mate with it, eventually flying away confused and covered in pollen, only to be deceived again. I…
Read MoreBig Glass Cases
After a dinner of gnocchi and brimming red wine, Joe and I were promenading on the cobblestone streets of Firenze. The city night had a warm, honey glow, as leather shops and gelato parlors beckoned. The week was almost over. Between Rome and Florence, I had seen, eaten, and avoided everything the editors of Lonely…
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