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Sexuality
Long-Distance Relationship
November 12
I saw you on the street today, staring at me, smiling in front of the red sky at sunset. I don’t know what you were doing there, what business ghosts might have to attend to, but thanks for showing up. You don’t know how precious a few seconds on the sidewalk can be until they’re gone.
Torpedoes D’Amour
While my contemporaries wailed in the throes of romantic and copulatory obsession, I suspected that every form of adult intimacy, sex especially, was less like the delivery of a vital and sophisticated pleasure than it was a sleek torpedo you never really saw coming until you were struck broadside and blown to smithereens.
May 2016The Portal
The second portal to Mere had been two feet high and three feet across. Amber knew this because later she returned to that exact spot beside the woods and measured where the portal had been using her wooden school ruler. She did not know the size of the first portal because she had been much younger then — just six; she was seventeen now — and so she had overlooked many important details.
March 2016Embracing Ignorance
Jack Miles On His Path From Belief To Disbelief And Back
We’re all stuck with ignorance as we move from quandary to quandary. What I want to do is make a case for religion as one of the means to cope with this irremediable human condition.
March 2016The Same Movies
He never listens to my dreams. “Dreams / aren’t real,” he says dismissively. And he’d prefer it / if I filled out a rebate for a toothbrush instead of starting another / poem.
February 2016Ode To A Summer Evening In France
We ate snails from their shells, dipped bread in the sauce. / The man we were visiting poured more wine, / said he hoped we’d stay a long time.
February 2016The University Of Men
First Susan got engaged to an archeologist, / who took her to excavate dinosaur bones in Tibet. / At night in their double sleeping bag, / while he catalogued her body parts, / Suze discovered her inner Tibetan.
December 2015Phys Ed
Recently my twelve-year-old son, Darius, matter-of-factly informed me that he was playing football in the fall.
“No, you aren’t,” I said.
September 2015The Disposable Rocket
The number of men who do lasting damage to their young bodies is striking; war and car accidents aside, secondary-school sports, with the approval of parents and the encouragement of brutish coaches, take a fearful toll of skulls and knees.
September 2015