Browse Topics
Marriage
When No One Is Watching
I’ve come to love this island. Hawaii has mostly been subdued by human habitation, but there are still pockets of wilderness, like this one. A trail from our land leads to where I’m sitting on a tablecloth beside the stream with my laptop. When I look at my computer screen, I see my reflection, in which my bald head is hidden by a scarf. I’ve had no hair for six months now, a constant reminder that I have breast cancer.
August 2015
Needs
I need a hug from you, from behind, as I’m standing at the kitchen window, washing dishes and looking at the one pink-flowering branch left on the peach tree.
August 2015The Pearls
An engagement present from my husband’s parents, / they seemed like something from a yearbook photograph. / I’d have preferred a wrought-iron pendant, costume / beads that caught the sunlight.
June 2015
March 2015
After being married to Norma for thirty-one years, I still have such sexy dreams about her. This morning I considered waking Norma to finish what my dream Norma had started.
March 2015The Full Eighty-Eight
They were living off Floreta’s pay now. Money was tight, but it had always been that way, forty years of never catching up. If they ever did get a little bit ahead, something always happened: a recession, a car crash, a broken bone, an illness.
March 2015
There Is No Secret
The peculiar thing about adulthood is that eventually you discover there is no such thing as adulthood. There are only best guesses and increasingly permanent results.
March 2015
First Love
A shoebox full of correspondence, a birthday party magician, summer camp
March 2015
Bloodlines
A marriage can be many things. Ours was a series of secrets and small betrayals, little lies that poison you like an odorless gas you don’t even know you’re breathing until you stop.
March 2015
What You Don’t Know For Certain
In the middle of the night there are no answers, not even any suitable questions. Lie dumbstruck in the enormous space of that unknowing. Try to see your part in this. Stand at the mirror and comb through a list of possibilities: not smart enough, not romantic enough. You have known rejection, but its teeth were never this long or this sharp.
March 2015
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