Browse Topics
Family and Relationships
Manicure
What remains of their visit is memory, residue, / trickles of sand from our trip to the beach. / I confess, I like my bedazzled talons . . .
August 2025Start with Overripe Bananas
You have to start with overripe bananas. Really overripe—not yellow with a couple of streaks but two thin-skinned ones that can hardly contain their own soft flesh. You should be able to smell banana from across your kitchen.
August 2025
There, Here, Jazz
The first time I walked into our new old house, it was the light / that surprised me—how much of it fell through the four windows / facing south and landed wide across the floorboards . . .
August 2025A Good House
Two days before our family moved into a boxy, modern, three-bedroom home—our first house, forty miles outside Boston and across the highway from the poetically named Long-Sought-For Pond—the painters we hired to paint the bathroom found black mold in a wall. A chunk of plaster had bubbled up and fallen off at the lightest scrape of sandpaper. A week later, we spent an hour in the pouring rain with the home inspector—at last. The housing market was so tight that we’d only briefly toured the house before closing.
August 2025
Tips
Waiting tables at a diner, playing in a wedding band, giving massages at the Phallus Palace
August 2025
The Seafood Stand
Once, my father drove from New Jersey to California by siphoning gas from strangers’ cars, then sent his van off the Pacific Coast Highway by laying a brick on the accelerator. His mother almost died when she heard.
August 2025
Rough Road
Beat from cycling around town all morning collecting rejections, I scarfed down a fast-food burger that settled into my gut like wet plaster. I just wanted to sit in the air-conditioning and pretend things were going to be OK, but a kid in his polyester uniform started slinging ammonia water from a mop bucket, and the smell made my sinuses hurt.
August 2025
At Union Square Park
A buck isn’t enough for his cup, this ex-con / wants a five, yelling for every passerby to stop / and read his Rikers wristband. // Look hard. Harder, he demands as he points.
August 2025
Brother, Electric
He grabs my hand, and static electricity snaps between us, as though he is coursing with energy. He blows his hot breath on my frozen fingertips and tells me it’ll be OK.
August 2025
Parting Advice
I forgot our host had a cat, / so Tony and I both backed out the door / to grab the Allegra I always keep in my car, / a habit that says a lot about me, / he said, before we threw back our heads / and downed our pills like shots of whiskey
July 2025
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