Browse Topics
Grief
Saddam Hussein Is Writing Poetry In Solitary Confinement
I laughed when I told my friend: / Saddam is writing poems! / No matter how down and out you are, there’s always / poetry! I snorted. / When the last rotten plank / in the basement of your mind has fallen through, / pray that a thin lifeline of words may sustain you.
December 2006The Marriage Bed
You will have to take my word on this: we loved each other. We were married to other people, we fell in love, and finally we were together and then married, for thirty years. We both expected Bill to die first; I was twenty-seven years old and he was fifty-four when we met, and through all of those years, even from the beginning, I told myself that I could live with his absence because our love would carry me the way a wave carries the light of the sun.
August 2006
Diagnostic Tools
They breathe deeply and put their hot hands on me. I lie on their padded massage table, on their soft sheets. Light slants across the room and into the kitchen, illuminating the place where my seventeen-year-old dog lies on his bed, unable to move without human hands to hoist his hind end up, a human voice to encourage him on his journey into the leaf-covered yard.
June 2006
Ways To Show Affection
The heat isn’t working in the clinic waiting room. A bronze bust of Margaret Sanger, patron saint of birth control, scrutinizes me from a plaster podium, and a slide show, Ways to Show Affection without Intercourse, is projected half on a pull-down screen and half on the cottage-cheese ceiling.
May 2006
Mercy
The children’s puppy was run over at the end of May. Not on the main road, which Pam might have expected, but on the dirt track that formed the western boundary of the farm.
May 2006
Decisions
To pull the plug, to go from judgment to acceptance, to leave a marriage
April 2006
Hello, Gorgeous!
His biggest thrill was meeting someone new. Three or four times a day, at least, he would see a girl and just be unable to stop looking at her. Hello, gorgeous! he would think.
April 2006
Adrift
Renee and I walked quickly into the sand dunes, out of sight of the water. My last backward glance found the seal pup floating in the surf like a piece of kelp. He haunted my thoughts the entire way home. That night, curled in bed with a pillow, I sobbed off and on for hours. The pup adrift in a tumbling world had cracked open the grief that I had felt the need to hide.
March 2006
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