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Marriage
January 2011
I haven’t written in more than a week. Forgive me, O Muse, for being absent without leave. Maybe it’s the Prozac. Maybe it’s the rain. Maybe it’s because I’m too damn vain. Can’t I put down simple words and send them out the door?
January 2011The Oar: A Summer In Three Acts
I had anchored my boat on an inside bend of the snowmelt-fed Rock Creek. Whoever christened that body of water a “creek” had clearly never attempted to cross it in June, when the burly current threatens to unfoot the knee-deep wader.
December 2010
The Best Part
At my former father-in-law’s funeral in November, I walked up to my ex-husband Billy and kissed him. It was our fifth kiss in thirty years: one when we finalized our divorce, one at his mother’s funeral, one at our son’s wedding, one at the birth of our twin grandchildren four months before, and now this kiss, with its hint of grief. I still loved his parents. And I had loved him once.
October 2010
The Stew
She began cooking the stew at 5:41 A.M. on Thursday. Somewhere in the night her husband had, as was his habit, moved to the middle of the bed, and she’d found herself precariously perched between his chest and the edge of the mattress, the inhabitant of an inconsequential strip of bedding that had, over the past few years, become her home.
October 2010
The Last Word
A pair of rainbow-striped socks, a cassette tape, the San Francisco Marathon
August 2010
What About God
The rabbi is coming to talk about the wedding. We lay out cookies, tamari almonds, stuffed grape leaves, hummus, crackers, and strips of sweet red peppers.
June 2010
Love Poem
I hear cooing and scuffling as I stand on the steps of my building / and at first, with the fluttering, hope for an angel, a visitation, but / then realize I am listening to pigeons, crammed in a window box, / mating over my head.
April 2010hank
hank fell stepping off an escalator at rockefeller center and banged his head up good/ spent the next ten days in roosevelt hospital/ crankily submitting to every test
February 2010Narrow Escapes
A noodle shop in central Burma, The Phil Donahue Show, the Tet Offensive
January 2010
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