Browse Topics
Death
Skill Set
. . .What it amounts to is that I feel / beauty all over, almost everywhere, the grass // growing from a mud puddle earlier today, the shadows shifting on distant mountains. . .
October 2025Getting Dressed
Sleeping in uniform, layering against the cold, wearing your spouse’s jeans
September 2025
Start 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
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
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 2025Levi Strauss & Co.
When he dies, my father turns into a small stone on the bed. A smooth oval I weigh in my palm, grip, and then, after a minute, draw circles over with my thumb.
July 2025Glimpses
This is how we say I love you in my family:
“I stopped the truck to move two toads off the driveway last night.”
“The walking iris has three blooms on it today.”
“On my way to work, a fox crossed the road with a mallard in its mouth.”
May 2025
Goodbye Note
Someone hung wind chimes in our cemetery / and a wren house / and mirrored mylar pinwheels.
May 2025
Missing
One week before the planes flew into the towers, I secured my first full-time, salaried job. I had applied to work for the New York City Parks Department at the suggestion of my roommate, Ethan. He’d recently quit his Parks job—not because he hadn’t liked it, but because he was, by his own reckoning, in the midst of a quarter-life crisis, brought on by the unexpected death of his father a few years earlier. Ethan regarded me as lucky because my mother had at least told me about her cancer diagnosis before she’d died. From his father he’d inherited a three-bedroom apartment on Roosevelt Island, just one subway stop and a short walk from Central Park. Ethan sublet my room to me for $667, a remarkably low rent for a building with a doorman, pool, and gym.
May 2025
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