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Childhood
A 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
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
Roots and Rhizomes
I know now that you aren’t born a parent. But you are born with inherited traits and proclivities that you end up either nurturing or starving out. Life, in my experience, requires a lot of deadheading. I’m glad my father taught me how to do it at such a young age.
July 2025
Complexion
A prominent birthmark, an elaborate skin-care regimen, a secret ancestry
July 2025
Shimmer
We don’t have all the facts—the social worker closed her eyes, her head dipping almost imperceptibly—but she did tell us that before he was moved into the foster system, at night, after his biological mother had passed out, this one impossibly small boy would tuck his younger siblings into bed and, in case his father somehow found his way home, sit in a kitchen chair across from the front door, an old air rifle pumped and butted up against the slender wing of his shoulder.
July 2025
Become a Friend of The Sun
My dad and I joke that reading The Sun is a family tradition, passed down through generations. Dad received his first gift subscription in the 1980s from his mom, whom I called Gan. Gan was the family matriarch, full of strong opinions on everything from the Reagan-infused politics of the day to the best way to brew a cup of tea.
June 2025Roots and Rhizomes
Read an Essay from an Upcoming Issue
This essay will appear in What My Father and I Don’t Talk About, edited by Michele Filgate. Copyright © 2025 by Michele Filgate. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, NY.
Zuma
When you get to your father's bedroom, you see Dad shaking like a freshly fumigated bug. Your brother is by his side on the phone, his face red and sweaty, like when he's been skateboarding all day.
April 2025
Thievery
I was sure I'd heard our front gate squeal and rattle. We live on a tree-lined Chicago street where 6 AM on Sunday is the time for arriving home from the night shift or heading out to the early shift or, in the case of a very few early risers, walking a dog.
April 2025
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