Browse Topics
Sexual Violence
Griswald
All you know is how sunny it was — so bright you could hardly see — and how the old man kept trying to tip you back into the stream, the water electric and cold, old Mr. Griswald saying not to worry, his hands on your shoulders, him standing in the water behind you, you this little kid, nine or ten years old, that voice of his strange and far above, saying not to worry, saying just lie back, saying he has you, he has you.
January 2009
The Family Plot
The summer after my father attempted suicide, I found myself wandering through a graveyard near my house, up and down the rows of sunken headstones and faded pink cloth roses. I didn’t know a soul buried there, and I didn’t know what solace I expected to find.
October 2008
Leave The Light On
John Records On His Work With Homeless People
Anytime we see an adult who is homeless, we can think about the child they once were and what might have happened to them. Anytime we see somebody who is pushing a shopping cart and talking to themselves or apparently drunk on the sidewalk, we know they didn’t start out that way. They were once every bit as adorable as any other child; there was every bit as much hope in their eyes, every bit as much beauty in them as in our own children. Something happened to them, probably something awful, probably more than once, that broke them and brought them to their sorry state. They were once children who didn’t get a fair break. So let’s honor who they were. Let’s at least give them a fair break now.
September 2008
Mrs. Bernadette
Once, Mrs. Bernadette described the effect to me: “Have you ever seen a crow in flight, and you saw its feet pulled up under it as it rowed itself to wherever it was going? When I get the laughing gas, I feel like those helpless feet being carried along underneath that beautiful bird. It’s nice to let something else take over for a while. The world is too much with us.”
September 2008
What Is Left
I spent twelve years in the state penitentiary for crimes imagined by children and believed by adults. For those twelve years, my body became my enemy and my commodity — I let the inmates hurt me so I could live. Besides the common abuses, they also broke my fingers and thumbs and sometimes the little bones in my hands. Once, they shattered a wrist.
October 2007
Telling The Truth
Library books, a stage production of Cheaper by the Dozen, bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches
October 2007
Selected Poems
You said you thought the word was pure / to describe the moonlight above us / on our last night in boarding school, / when you and I broke the rules and slept / outside under a blanket of young summer.
— from “To My Lifelong Friend Going To Prison”
June 2007Small Victories
Delivering a calf, surviving a rape, arm-wrestling like a girl
April 2005
Apologies
Clipping perfect long-stemmed roses, having failed as a teacher, keeping people happy while they piss away all their money playing high-limit baccarat and blackjack
February 2005
