Browse Topics
Aging
In The Dermatologist’s Office, Again
The cancer he wanted / to cut out of my back / somehow disappeared / in the month / since the biopsy.
July 2018In Praise Of Incompetence
That word, competence, came to me after my six-year struggle; it came as an alternative, if not an outright escape hatch, to the daily grind of despair.
July 2018
The Narrows
My sister Nell and I were standing on the banks of the Duvallis River, waiting for a man to float down it.
July 2018
For Eli Jacobson
There are few of us now, soon There will be none. We were comrades Together, we believed we Would see with our own eyes the new World where man was no longer Wolf to man, but men and women Were all brothers and lovers Together. We will not see it.November 2017
Telling Time
We rent a condominium together, my eighty-six-year-old widowed mother and I. Sometimes she summons me from her bedroom at the end of the hall. I have learned to guess from her tone what it is she wants.
November 2017The Art Of Aging
As you read this essay, you are aging. The older you get, the more you become an emissary from a vanished world — in my case, a world of black-and-white photographs taken by a Brownie camera, the sun bleaching the faces of the squinting subjects.
April 2017Still Running
Kathrine Switzer, the first woman to officially enter the Boston Marathon. She wasn’t looking to make history; she only wanted to run. But in 1967 the marathon was closed to women. So she entered as “K.V. Switzer” and ran in disguise for four miles until the race director, Jock Semple, jumped off the press truck and shouted, “Get the hell out of my race!” The picture of him trying to rip the number off her chest made headlines.
February 2017
What Love Looks Like From Here
We’ve been married nearly forty years, but we are still learning from my parents what love looks like: How it moves. All the shapes it takes. Though my parents can no longer care for themselves, they care for each other.
February 2017
Selected Poems
— from “Wanting” | Wanting’s the thing, not the thing itself. / The thing itself no longer calls to me
January 2017
Scotty
The story begins with a message on Facebook: “I’m looking for Wayne Scott from the Baltimore area. A Navy veteran, about seventy-two or seventy-three. A relative of yours by any chance?” A phone call to my mother confirms that my father, whose name I inherited and who was close-lipped about his past, had dropped out of high school and joined the Navy when he was seventeen.
January 2017
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