Infidelity

The Night I Don't Remember

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0500

It doesn’t matter how many AA meetings you go to. As long as you are taking oxycodone and oxymorphone, you’re going to be high, and, as long as you have complex regional pain syndrome, you’re going to be taking something serious for the pain.

Waterfall

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0500

Sex, to me, was like a solvent, cutting through layers of everyday grime. Without it, irritations accumulated with no way of wiping the slate clean; disappointment coagulated into distress. I felt forlorn, restless, and disconnected. Yet no matter how many times I sounded the alarm, my husband never seemed to hear me.

Don’t Be Alarmed

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 12:00:00 -0500

After her third glass of wine, Beatrice got up to look at Bert and Martin’s wedding photo, the one with the understated silver frame and the two of them making out like teenagers, Martin’s leg wrapped around Bert’s thigh. It was supposed to be a joke, but they ended up liking it. She stared at it and thought, This was the man I thought I was spending my life with.

Rude and Raw

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 12:00:00 -0400

If you were around then, you probably blinked and missed Rude and Raw. Not many people noticed when they came on the scene, and even fewer paid attention when they left. They weren’t easily categorized. They weren’t hard rock or power pop, and veered off several exits short of punk. They probably had people telling them they should be more of this or less of that, but if so, they didn’t heed any of it. They seemed caught in this never-ending state of becoming, trying to figure things out as they went, as strange and undefinable to themselves as they were to others.

Without the Gate

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0500

Usually he has a morning episode, then he’s placid most of the day, chatty, gently losing his mind in starts and stops. But after dinner the maximum horror falls on him. He stiffens, his face wracked. He’s at the threshold; he can almost remember the “thing.”

His Body Of Work

cow2pie@aol.com — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 05:05:00 -0500

I loved my father’s body. It worried me, too. . . . I didn’t know what polio was, but it sounded scary, and he had survived it. This helped form my view of him as someone who could survive almost anything. Like Wile E. Coyote, he might get hurt and maimed, but he never, ever gave up.

Dating Apps

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 04:00:00 -0400

Meeting a spouse, rediscovering an ex, matching with yourself

Pinecones

Wed, 30 Nov 2022 05:00:00 -0500

When my wife said, “Linda? Really?” I found myself stammering, denying it. “What?” I asked. “No.” Like my wife was being crazy. Why do men do that: act like women are crazy when they see us most clearly?

Leaving Austin

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 -0500

It seems she was surprised to hear from me. “Marion,” she wrote back a week later, “I kinda liked you when I met you, and then I learned to love you, but now you’re just the skank that fucked my man when I was struggling to make a family.”

Freedom From Delusion

Tue, 01 May 2018 00:00:00 -0400

The last time I was in London, I kept passing store windows full of tea towels and souvenir mugs with the motto Keep Calm and Carry On. I once read that when the British government dreamed up the slogan at the onset of World War II, the populace was insulted at being given advice that went without saying.

Love Your Enemies

Wed, 01 Mar 2017 00:00:00 -0500

The title “visiting instructor” suited me. Born into a life of hippie nomadism (even living out of a van at one point in my childhood), I’d been roaming since I’d left home at seventeen. An impulsive enrollment in graduate school at the age of thirty had been intended to impose order on my life, but at thirty-five I was as adrift as ever.

Pretty Women

Sun, 01 Jan 2017 00:00:00 -0500

Later I showed my evidence. I had text messages of course; everyone always has text messages. The text message is now the lipstick on the collar, and the worst thing is that, much like the lipstick, it only hints at what really is going on.

The Bird List

Thu, 01 Sep 2016 16:45:00 -0400

We started to keep a list — not just a traditional list of birds but a record of two lives coming together. We were strict, allowing on it only birds we saw in tandem. Anything experienced without the other didn’t count anymore. That first bird, Bullock’s oriole — black and white with a bright-orange belly — coincided with our first kiss, under a cloudless sky at Sunol Regional Wilderness Area.

The Possible Universe

Thu, 01 Sep 2016 16:44:00 -0400

The first time the married man tells you to kneel and wait for him, you are at home in your pajamas. He is at work, and his text arrives over your phone: how fast can you put on a sexy outfit complete with shoes and unlock your door and be kneeling silent in your apartment when i come in.

The Radical Idea Of Marrying For Love

Thu, 01 Sep 2016 16:43:00 -0400

For most of history it was inconceivable that people would choose their mates on the basis of something as fragile and irrational as love and then focus all their sexual, intimate, and altruistic desires on the resulting marriage.

First Love

Sun, 01 Mar 2015 00:00:00 -0500

A shoebox full of correspondence, a birthday party magician, summer camp

Jolene

Sun, 01 Mar 2015 00:00:00 -0500

John and I first met in an aisle of a snack shop run by a blind man named Ray. By the time we got to the register, we were deep in conversation. Ray handed me my change and said, “That guy is smitten with you.”

A More Perfect Union

Sun, 01 Dec 2013 00:00:00 -0500

People come to me because their spouse isn’t making them happy. I don’t think any of our grandparents would have considered that a reason to seek therapy. A passionate relationship in which we ask for novelty and mystery from the same person we look to for security and stability — that is a grand new invention in the history of humankind.

Thinking

Sun, 01 Sep 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Don’t you wish they would stop, / all the thoughts swirling around in your head like / bees in a hive, dancers tapping their way across the stage?

Alternate

Sun, 01 Sep 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Before Cat and I became a couple, before we even knew each other, we were a team: knocking on strangers’ doors to bring them Barack Obama’s tidings of hope. Everyone in Brooklyn was already voting for him anyway, so they just cheered us on and thanked us for our service. There was a precoital vibe, a tingling anticipation of victory.

Michael The Armadillo

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

They’d made it through all the Michaels, Carrie and Dan believed. They’d made it through Michael J. Fox’s comeback and Michael Vick’s arrest and Michael Douglas’s cancer, made it through the terrible summer when Michael Phelps won all those gold medals in swimming, and then the next terrible summer when Michael Jackson died on every channel for days and days.

Selected Poems

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

— from “Wondrous” | I’m driving home from school when the radio talk / turns to E.B. White, his birthday, and I exit / the here and now of the freeway at rush hour

Rumors

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Red patent leather shoes, the Y2K bug, the Gestapo

Overflow

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400

On the day my mom got her last chemo treatment, I fished from the dike of the Intake Reservoir. I wasn’t supposed to be fishing. I was supposed to be delivering the Hawthorne Pennysaver. My summer job was to place a crisp Pennysaver at each of the 465 doorways of the Pleasant Pines Apartments once a week, but I hadn’t done that for months.

The Back Door

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 12:53:00 -0400

Catching fireflies, caring for a newborn calf, hearing a slamming door for the first time

The Clothes He Wore

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Normally I wouldn’t have found them, because I am an exceptionally lazy housekeeper. Or maybe I’m not so much lazy as inept. I discovered in my teens that if you didn’t know how to do housework, you wouldn’t have to do it, and now that I’m living on my own and have to do it, I don’t know how. Anyway, one summer morning I had the day off. I woke up, saw my messy flat as if for the first time, and got a shock.

Ten Thousand Years

Sat, 01 May 2010 00:00:00 -0400

When I told Thomas about my experience — “transcendental,” I called it — he was skeptical. I had only been studying yoga for three weeks. Thomas, on the other hand, had been practicing yoga and meditation for eight years. In all that time he hadn’t felt anything even close to what I was describing.

Uncommon Weather

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Herb had finally hit the jackpot in the herring-roe fishery and decided that, with the girls gone, I might enjoy some creature comforts to take the edge off being alone in the cabin so much. Unfortunately I had already come to the same conclusion, and one of the comforts I’d treated myself to was named Jimmy.

Piano Lessons

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0400

We lived in an old, two-story Arts and Crafts house with an elevator, which was permanently stuck on the second floor. We used it as a storage closet, and it was my favorite place in the whole house. Now I went into the elevator and shut the gate and sat in one of the antique ladder-back chairs that my father had put in there, and I looked over the Chopin piece in my piano book and tried to visualize my future.

The Mysterious Life Of The Heart

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 09:40:00 -0500