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Physical Health
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
My Fight Against Time
The desire to hang on to youth for as long as one could — to see that as greed was new to me, and the idea had deep implications for how I saw myself.
July 2022
Poetry
Another View
This morning the receptionist ushers me / into the Magnolia Room, reserved / for those receiving a “different type” / of mammogram, although I can discern / no obvious difference from the Dogwood Room, / where I waited last week for the usual sort, / the one about which my friends and I joke / and pretend we schedule as casually as a teeth-cleaning.
February 2022Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Between Notes
I add thirty-eight points to Dad’s side of the scorecard. “You’re kicking my ass,” I say. He gathers the cards and begins to shuffle, his hands clumsy, the cards slipping out onto the table. “Let me,” I say, but he says he can do it, that it’s his turn.
November 2021
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Relationship Tips
I put aside the previous rejections and try again. This time I don’t mess around with coffee. I don’t want anything that might allow her a graceful out or result in a request to be friends. I have friends. I ask her on a dinner date.
November 2021
Poetry
A Few Days After My First Vaccine
Walking by the lake, I lose an earring / and don’t even notice it at first, / overwhelmed as I am / by the strangeness of everything.
October 2021Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
What I Lived For
When I was young, I lived for what I thought of as “lyrical moments,” when the details of life were suddenly heightened and approached the transcendent. . . . Of course, if you live long enough, you start thinking more and more not about the lyrical but rather about time. . . . I am living to stay alive.
June 2021
Poetry
Wanting Things To Be Different
A relapse of Lyme disease: / fever and chills, flickers of pain. / I want to sleep all the time, and my arms ache. / I lie on the steel grate that juts over the stream.
June 2021Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Surviving Documents
In the video he is an energetic storyteller relating episodes of great violence in a can-you-believe-it tone better suited to recounting a kooky incident out running errands. There is also the Yiddish tide of his syntax, which deposits nouns in unexpected places, like a rocking chair found sitting on the roof of a toolshed after a flood.
June 2021Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Mild Case
When did the distance from the bed to here become twenty-six miles? That pair of pants I stepped over, you see that? Goddamn Everest that was.
April 2021
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