Browse Topics

Anatomy Lesson

I didn’t hear the word vulva until I was thirty. Instead I grew up hearing about it, my private parts, my down there. My mother and grandmother used Italian slang to refer to it: pesciuscia.

Shame

After fourteen years of yard-walking a life sentence, Broadus Creek wore the mask of a traveler, implacably intent upon his route but thoroughly fortified against destination.

Treadmill

Like a warm cloak, the mundane settled onto his shoulders. He pulled the edges of his days close around him, nestling into their routines.

Saturday Morning At The Supermarket

Double Blind

When Healing Is A Gamble

I’ve been a medical research subject for two years now. A human guinea pig. There never really was a choice. I have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), an illness for which there is no cure or treatment, an illness so misunderstood and misnamed that it has been virtually ignored by most medical practitioners and researchers. Calling this Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is like calling Parkinson’s disease Chronic Shaking Syndrome: the name addresses the symptom not the cause of the disease.

Hearts

You knew a boy who died of suicide. It was a mountain and he was playing chicken with friends, but he wanted to fall, he wanted to be the dead one. His parents said. You weren’t there.

Impotence

The GirlsClub

I’m depressed. My girlfriend left me. Then I got cancer of the colon, so I had to have my large intestine removed, cut out, the whole thing, gone.

Ten Years Later

A sister’s grief, an aging woman’s grace, a rape victim’s triumph

Selected Poems