Astonish
Astonish (v.) In 1300, there was a word, astonien, which meant “to stun” or “strike senseless,” which came from the Old French estoner—to stun, daze, deafen, or astound. This came from Latin’s ex- meaning “out” + tonare: to thunder. (See thunder). See thunder, hear lightning, ride air, the wind is your breath, you lift the...
White and Weird
You think it is you who are at fault, you with your round “Buddha belly” and your long “Buddha ears” and your squinty “Buddha eyes.” The kids at school wonder why you can’t be normal. “You’re so weird,” they say. Weird because of your weird Thai lunches of rice and fish sauce and hot dogs...
Tete Draga’s Memorial
My father-in-law in Pittsburgh sent money for Teta Draga’s gravestone at his cousin Nikola’s request, large bills hidden in a small envelope, the way it had to be back then, in communist Yugoslavia. The woman had raised him after his own mother abandoned her bastard child for America and a loveless marriage. She gave him...
Whatcha Gonna Do?
We are wearing our Sunday best because it is a Sunday afternoon and we’ve just come from church and my mother has invited home for lunch a one-armed man named Joe, not because he has one-arm, but because he is new in town and alone and this is what my mother does—she collects people and...
Meditation on a Morning Commute
I must tell you that in the thick of autumn on a sixty-mile stretch of Michigan highway between my cold apartment and my dark office I’ve lost count of the number of mangled deer carcasses staining the concrete shoulder, whiplashed, eyes vacant, thin necks assuredly bent at some horrendous angle, clumps of bones and fur...
The Sauna
Whenever you were sick, which you often were—running around in the cool Los Angeles rain with a pair of flip flops and a tank top often led to pneumonia—your father would make you join him in the sauna. A dark wooden coffin that sat by the fluorescent laundry room. A time machine into the sweaty...
Complex as the Treaty of Versailles
I’m trying not to lose patience as the pharmacy clerk conducts some sort of complex transaction with the old guy at the counter, complex as the Treaty of Versailles apparently, and he can hardly hear her and I want to shout throw a hearing aid in with the deal and all of us in the...
The Facts of Life, Irish and Unabridged
The whole of my sex education—a single sentence—took place during a visit to Aunt Sis’s house. Sis and her husband and two children lived in Queens on a street with lots of space between the houses. We lived in the Bronx, where the alleys between apartment buildings were barely wider than the garbage cans. Sis...
A Thing of Air
When your son is on a ventilator, you need someone to say it’s just a precaution. In the space those words would fill, I tuck his man-hand along with the answers I didn’t have when I brought his limp body to this place. How much has he had to drink? Always too much. I stroke...
Neurod(i)verse Sounds Like Universe
I am still adjusting. To prose. The endless line. Adjusting to nonfiction. To motherhood & writing mothering so my “I” has nothing to hide behind. The lyric stripped of so much music & light. I used to turn to moon, then the stars....
Stop
How did we end up here at the top of the stairs in Lewisohn Hall, on the night of the afternoon that we first met on the limestone steps of the campus library? After I told you that I was a public school girl from the north shore of Long Island and you said, when...
The Space Between the Shower and the Toilet
I hear things my husband does not. See movement from the corners of my eyes. Watch as shadows fade and darken with the deliberate pulsing of our overhead lights. “It’s an older house,” he likes to explain. “Someday, you’ll get used to it.” The shoddy electrical work. The hiss-growling furnace. The groaning water pipes, rusted...
Xibalbá :: Ritual
_____ _____, (birthdate). I slide my left arm out of the pink hospital wrap before the technician says Good. Twenty-five days of _____ _____, (birthdate) & the response, Good, that’s you. Each step of cancer treatment becomes its own type of ritual. With chemo: Say your name & birthdate, Heparin to clean the port, water...
Not the Plan
You didn’t answer, and you said you’d answer, just like he’d said, I’ll be here reading the Times til you come home, and when I came home his car was gone. And he was gone. And his phone lay under a pillow in our bed, which was not the plan. His death certificate in my...
Mountain Milk
“Let’s go,” he says. “Now, while the weather’s holding.” There’s no point in saying no. Once he’s decided to climb, nothing will deter him. Not my pleas to hike somewhere easier, or my reminders that there’s no extra milk at home for our infant daughter. Not our promises to my mother that we wouldn’t be...
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