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Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Messages
In the months following Mom’s death in February 2021, I tried to get her to say something to me, to speak to me. If anyone could communicate from beyond, I thought, it was her.
September 2022
Fiction
Trudy Deere Goes To Heaven
I’ve been in the hospital four days when they put another woman in the room with me — an old farm wife from Beardstown, by the name of Trudy Deere. Trudy Deere has been in a car accident. She’s recuperating.
March 1998Poetry
Stepping Out Of The Body
Like someone stepping / from a pair of dirty overalls, / turned inside out on the bathroom floor, / I step from my body.
February 2003Fiction
What The Dead Know
It began in the hospitals with what seemed to be an epidemic of miracles. The most recently dead came back first. People whose heartbeats had just flat-lined a second earlier suddenly sat upright on their gurneys and beds and looked into the confused faces of those around them.
October 2004
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Telephone
When I was growing up in Magdaluna, a small Lebanese village in the terraced, rocky mountains east of Sidon, time didn’t mean much to anybody, except maybe to those who were dying, or those waiting to appear in court because they had tampered with the boundary markers on their land. In those days, there was no real need for a calendar or a watch to keep track of the hours, days, months, and years.
August 1997Readers Write
The Phone Call
Matzo for Passover, extenuating circumstances, a bundle of dope
September 2002
Photography
Our Own Devices
After a few failed attempts to have conversations with friends who could not keep their eyes off their screens for more than ten minutes, I began taking photographs of people lost inside their phones.
March 2019
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Burden Of Bearing Fruit
Everyone who came over said of the cherry, “Great tree,” especially in July, when its fruit started to ripen. The squirrels and the birds took the lion’s share, mocking me by dropping half-eaten cherries on the patio and the lawn. I ate only the ones I could reach simply by pulling down a branch and plucking. I’d had Rainier cherries from the store, but these fruits were a surprise: the flesh so sweet and yet so complex; the firm skin giving way to the textured meat beneath; almost like a golden plum, but small and round and mine.
January 2011
Fiction
Just Wind, And A Creek
Thanks to prison, he settled for sitting, munching applesauce doughnuts, and watching his candle burn. No bleeding-heart bullshit, no prayerlike mutterings, no beseechings or lamentations from Everett. He’d come a long way, after a long wait, to do a simple thing, so he shut up, sat down, and did it.
September 1995
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