Browse Topics
Happiness
Praise Song For The Day
A Poem for Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration
December 2018
Being Broke
The kindness of strangers, the vicissitudes of life, the merry-go-round at the mall
May 2018
Stage Four
Now I believe in everything. / Aromatherapy: peppermint and sandalwood / and lavender and especially frankincense, / because, you know, the Three Wise Men. / Mindful breathing, I believe in that, too.
December 2017Dragon Pants
In 2001 I was twenty-four years old and visiting Paris when I bought a really great pair of pants. They were red and silky and had dragons and Chinese symbols embossed on them and cost only sixty francs, which wasn’t a lot, about eleven dollars. I bought them on the street from some hippie Romanian woman. (I don’t actually know where she was from, but she seemed Romanian.)
November 2017Sunbeams
September 2017It’s not enough to be gentle with those who are like us if we can’t find it in ourselves to be kind with those who are less fortunate than we are. The true test of our compassion lies in our ability to have concern for those least like ourselves.
Selected Poems
— from “Better Than Expected” | Things were not as bad as I had thought. / The scrape in the fender of the rented car / could be hidden with a little white paint / before I returned it to the agency.
August 2017A List Of My Utopias
My mother is a wood thrush, and my father is a great snipe. They aren’t my parents in this utopia. They’re birds who met once, then drifted apart, as birds do, so they could lead their own lives and become who they were meant to be. They have no children, bird or otherwise, tugging them in a different, boring direction.
April 2017Selected Poems
— from “Too Busy” | Have ambition and ego ruined my life? / Where have my easy days gone?
February 2017The Optimism Of Uncertainty
There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.
October 2016
Sunbeams
July 2016I am troubled by my shapeless fears. My God, these anxieties! Who can live in the modern world without catching his share of them?
Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
Subscribe Today