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Family and Relationships
Smoke Memories
My mother and I were alone the night / our house burned down. I was nine that summer, / and the smell of smoke clung to my clothes. / And after the fire a tree in the yard / grew crooked with scoliosis, its back bending / away from the remains of the house.
October 2023Off Camera
When I was a senior in high school, I became obsessed with the home movies Dad kept in his armoire, behind bottles of cologne. Every day I’d reach through a cloud of Brut and vanilla musk, remove a tape from the stack, and watch the footage alone in our basement, captivated by images of the kid I used to be.
September 2023
I Eat My Words
Yes, it’s cruel. An unseemly gluttony. / Trapping the ortolan buntings, forcing / them to gorge in the dark, mouthfeel of seeds / their only comfort in that closed, blank space.
September 2023Television
Sneaking cartoons, escaping into a sitcom, watching the election results
September 2023
The Tunnel
It started with the mouse in the grass by the sidewalk, ants / crawling on its face. Aidan wanted to touch it. I drew him back / and held him. We talked about the gray fur and the tiny ants. He asked / if the mouse was going to go home to his mama and daddy. / No, I told him, the mouse won’t get to go home again.
September 2023Lawn Skeletons
As far as I know, the first house in the neighborhood to adopt a year-round skeleton display was a small Cape Cod a couple of blocks from me. The skeletons sat side by side, day after day, in their Adirondack chairs, holding hands as if starring in a Cialis commercial.
September 2023
Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen
We are thirteen, my cousin Sally and me — girls on our own, on the roam, under the big skies of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. We’re here for the summer, living in a trailer that my aunt Helen has rented as part of a lengthy effort to seduce her law-school professor Phil, who lives next door.
August 2023
The Art Of Living
My fly line unspools across the water like a long sentence / whose final punctuation is a grizzly hackle tied by a friend. / He clamped his fly vise to the branch of a fallen pine / right after we arrived by mule train at this Montana river.
August 2023
What I Don’t Tell My Wife
There are many things I don’t tell my wife of ten years: Because she has asked me not to. Because she carries her own burdens. Because she has told me mine are too much.
August 2023Total Solar
We took our kids to City Hall Plaza / with its dead-on view / of South Mountain to watch / the moon eclipse our sun / in a certain way we’d been told / wouldn’t happen again / in our lifetime unless we traveled / to a far-off part of the globe.
August 2023
