Browse Topics
Cancer
Telling The Truth
Library books, a stage production of Cheaper by the Dozen, bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches
October 2007
The Hereafter
For someone who’s been to New Jersey only a handful of times, I have a long history with the Garden State. I’m visiting it now because my Aunt Velma is dying. The cancer’s giving us just enough time to say goodbye.
October 2007
With Eyes Open
My ex-husband is dying. A year and a half ago he was on the telephone with someone, and suddenly words vanished from his brain. English became a language he’d once known but had forgotten. The memory of those things called “words” was still there, but they were lumpy, pale, and almost unrecognizable, like dust-sheeted furniture in a mansion’s unused rooms.
September 2007
Confinement
I don’t remember the exact moment when I stopped seeing chemotherapy as a sort of adventure, a necessary bit of healthcare after a breast-cancer diagnosis, through which I would do my best to be a good girl, bright and brave. Maybe it was when I first encountered the nurses wearing plastic smocks to protect them from what they injected into me.
August 2007
September 2006
My daughter Mara has a suspicious lump in her breast; a biopsy is scheduled for later this week. If the lump turns out to be benign, I can go back to worrying about how far behind I am in my work or about the accelerated pace of global warming.
September 2006Selected Poems
Wounded like me, willing to talk, knowing / What a scarecrow cancer is, how people don’t / Want to linger near that kind of news, including / Friends who mean well, look away, act as if / They can’t hear, humming in their ear, “You’re / Human, human, human, you poor thing,
— from “Fellows”
July 2006A Year Like Any Other
How long will it be, after you die, before the last living person who knew you also dies? And when there is no one left living who remembers you, what will your life mean then, after all of the noise?
September 2005
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