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Family and Relationships
Leaving Austin
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.”
January 2019
Hello, Goodbye
You want to write back, He died. You want your hurt to be the world’s hurt. This pain is what was born tonight. It’s a palpable, physical thing, an object of infinite dimension that can be looked at from many angles, held closely or at a distance, and always there is some new aspect of the sorrow.
January 2019
Stories We Keep To Ourselves
They gather in lodges, these unflinching, / gray-haired men in caps with unit insignias. / The meat loaf and gravy on styrofoam goes / mostly untouched.
December 2018The Other, Invented Man
For many years — the majority of my life, in fact — acknowledging death’s inevitability exerted little psychological pressure on me. I had no fear of passing, as they say, from this world into the next, or, assuming no next world exists, simply entering oblivion.
December 2018
The Ghost Of A Boy
You can belong to yourself, but it’s lonely, and you can belong to others, but there’s loss built into that, in uncountable forms.
December 2018
Notes On Surrender
Over and over I have discovered that my children feel alienated in environments where, at their age, I felt an automatic sense of belonging.
December 2018
Men And Women
A teacher’s legacy, a professor’s dilemma, a stranger’s confessions
November 2018
Loving You Burns Like Shingles
My love for you is a sun inside my chest. / It burns like shingles, wrings tears from my eyes / like the hands of a tough old woman washing / clothes in a tin tub.
November 2018
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