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Sexual Violence
The Blue Devils Of Blue River Avenue
My mother didn’t like my going over to the Sambeauxs’. There was something mysterious and menacing about that house: a bloodcurdling scream, a silhouette of a knife in the window, a wolf on its hind legs with a leather tail scuffling along behind the juniper trees.
February 2023Past Lives
I know now this is the most dangerous time in an abusive relationship: right before the woman leaves. It’s when some women get murdered. I was lucky.
March 2022
The Lovely Harry, Philip Larkin, And Me
At the end of our weekly sessions, as I’m about to walk out the door, I hand The Lovely Harry a manila envelope of poems I’ve written that week. Some weeks it’s a thin envelope; other weeks the pages inside push against the seams with their folded energy.
April 2021The Children Are Fragile
It was after this, in the three or four weeks before she stopped coming to class entirely, that Sheila started bringing in the Murder Plays.
March 2021Firebirds
After barre, Mme. Francesca follows me to the locker room and tells me I’m officially going to the Cupids dance program this summer and I just can’t stand it.
July 2020
The World We Still Have
Barry Lopez On Restoring Our Lost Intimacy With Nature
One of the reasons we’re lonely . . . is that we’ve cut ourselves off from the nonhuman world, and have called this “progress.”
December 2019
Stories We Tell Now
We’ve all heard there was drinking, that the parents weren’t home, that the house was huge, full of places for disappearing. And when the girl pressed charges a week later, the boy was incredulous, and his parents were ready to put up a fight.
September 2019Childhood
Flunking a driver’s test, frightening a bully, grown up at fourteen
August 2019
The Only One She Told
You had the face of a man who couldn’t help understanding everything — all of it, the whole pathetic, tragic human thing — and that draws people in. To me you were a magnet of kindness.
January 2019
