Browse Topics

Her, Rising

Yes, there are the memories / like little phylacteries strapped to our minds, / and there are the ways we know our dead / have worked inside us

Sunbeams

The harder we look at our aches and ailments, the more we will be startled by the painful truths they are trying to convey about our dangerously disembodied way of life.

Marion Woodman

January 2000

Fear is nearby. God seems impossibly distant. Fear comforts me in a voice that’s so familiar. God’s voice comes to me as the barest whisper. I’m rarely quiet enough to hear it.

Dreams Of The Old Green Man

I was hiding in the bushes one Sunday afternoon when Sucker Boy came running through our courtyard holding up a giant bag of multicolored suckers. This was at the Bellview Apartments, a massive low-income complex that took up half a mile along University Avenue in San Diego, California. Sucker Boy had a long, twisting, whip-snapping line of admirers trotting after him, glossy-lipped Pied Piper children with suckers in their eyes. He was a damp, plump boy with a pinched pastry face and a treacherous smile. He was two years older than me, a second-grader. I never learned his real name. This was about eight minutes before he died.

Winter Was The Season

I don’t like saying goodbye to the people I’ve worked with at The Sun — not after we’ve spent years together drinking too much coffee and meeting impossible deadlines and struggling to make the magazine better and trying to be better people ourselves. But sooner or later they leave. A spouse gets a job offer in another city, or graduate school beckons, or it’s simply time to move on. We promise to keep in touch, and often we do. So it’s goodbye, but not really goodbye.

What Did You Think?

In Loco Parentis

For months afterward I had the sense that I was being questioned by reporters, or addressing a judge: For the record, Your Honor, the accident was not my fault. I plead not guilty. . . . And I was not in love with her!

Aphrodite

The End Of The Line

A jumper on the Bay Bridge, a last Christmas present, a drink of water

The Dead Boy At Your Window

In a distant land, a woman looked upon the unmoving form of her newborn baby and refused to see what the midwife saw.