Many Thanks

Gregg Krech On The Revolutionary Practice Of Gratitude

To me, grace comes from an examination of one’s life in which you realize that you don’t deserve what you’re getting, yet you’re getting it anyway. That is the experience of grace, both practically and spiritually. If you want to put it in secular terms, it’s the difference between seeing life as an entitlement and seeing it as a gift.

On Terror

She tries to catch her breath, takes tissue after tissue from my box. I give her a glass of water, and we do some deep-breathing exercises. I tell her to go slowly. I assure her that the past is over, although I know it is a lie. The past is alive. It is with us every moment, our lives slim transparencies between past and present.

The Penis That Killed Jeffrey City

I spent ten years working in the Poetry in the Schools program in Washington State, Alaska, Montana, Nevada, and Wyoming. I went from school to school helping kids write poems. Once, in Miles City, Montana, I was trying to get across to a group of sixth-graders the power of our senses — as well as the dislocation and excitement we feel when we do something out of the ordinary. So I asked them to lick a tree.

All There Is

“Your mother’s amazing,” my friends say. Several of them confide in her. They ask for and receive help from her on their deepest problems. Not me, though. She and I can sit in the same room for hours and barely speak. We’re like the north ends of two magnets, darting apart.

My Lunatic Brother

I’m sitting in my parents’ living room, listening to my older brother, Ben, tell the family how he’s recently discovered that his phone is being tapped. His tone is casual, even upbeat, as if he were discussing a stretch of unusually good weather.

Dear Me

If you are reading this letter, then I have some bad news for you. You’ve always been a straight shooter, so here it is: You have Alzheimer’s.

In Praise Of Four-Letter Words

We yell shit / when the egg carton slips / and the ivory globes / splatter on blue tile. / And when someone leaves you / bruised as a dropped pear, you spit / that fucker, fucking bastard, motherfucker.

Rooster

At the first crack / in dawn’s black eggshell, / my neighbor’s rooster crows / with a voice / like rusty tap water.