Browse Topics
Adolescence
Blood
A hockey rink, a volume of Anne Sexton’s collected poems, Planned Parenthood
December 2008
Where Water Comes From
I felt a jolt. Since my father had left, no one had said the word sadness. I had heard the words stingy and schmuck, but sadness seemed obscene, even more taboo than the topic of sex. Sadness was like my period, something that came regularly, to be borne in silence.
November 2008
Stuck
It was just my mother’s luck: Fred left, and then she couldn’t get her contraceptive sponge out. She had forgotten about it through the long night, as she and Fred had fought and car headlights had panned across my bedroom walls.
August 2008
Season Of My Grandfather
My mother, my stepfather, my five-year-old brother, and I lived in a sunny three-room tenement in Brooklyn, New York. The walls of our foyer were lined floor to ceiling with my mother’s books, and I read as many as possible, entering a trancelike state in which everything else floated on the edges of my awareness.
April 2008
Stealing
Five packs of Red Vines, Uncle Wiggily’s Garden Patch, Jackie Robinson
April 2008
Hungarian Relief
I was thirteen in 1956. There was a lot going on in the world that year. Elvis Presley released his first album, the U.S. exploded the first airborne hydrogen bomb over Bikini Atoll, and the Soviets invaded Hungary to put down an anticommunist revolution. There was also something going on in my house. I was only half aware of it, but it formed a kind of constant undercurrent, like a noise that your brain has not yet registered hearing.
July 2007
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