Carne Santificata
I am happy in this village above the sea, this Anacapri, where my husband and I, retired and tending our bucket list, have come to write and escape the dead of another Idaho winter. It is spring here, first flowers blooming, too early in the season for most tourists. The ritual evening passeggiata brings out...
Good Jew
I only go to one bar mitzvah, and it isn’t my own. I wear a yarmulke for the first and last time. I spend three days learning Yiddish on Duolingo and give up. I’m pretty sure I use the word “spiel” wrong. Sometimes, when the men on the corner ask me if I’m Jewish on...
Boxes
In this holy place, surrounded by portraits of the bearded and long deceased, I go about the familiar rituals. I hand the card with my request to the research librarian, and she walks over and sends a message to those below, in the building’s bowels. There the subterranean workers—it is hard not to imagine them...
Raiment
When my father stopped eating and we all understood it was a matter of time, I drove from Vermont to Boston to see him at the nursing home. He’d suffered a steady decline and lost the ability to care for himself, but his memory and cognitive abilities did not have the savage gaps of Alzheimer’s....
A Stranded Moose
A moose had stranded herself shoulder-deep in the bog last fall, at the southerly end of Long Pond. Of course, a car in the mud is one thing, a foundered moose another. One is a matter of inconvenience, the other of life or death. The animal was helpless, paralyzed. Fish and Game officers came out...
I Know My Body Tried to Save Me
Dirty, Poz, Faggot, G.R.I.D: pseudonyms for the boy I don’t want to be. Gay-related. Gay-related. I don’t want to be gay-related. I don’t want to be human-immunodeficient either. I don’t want to be in this I.D. clinic reading Tiny Beautiful Things, a book of collected advice columns, a bible that replaced my bible, turning random...
Hungry Because This World Is So Very Full
Across from the mountains, across from the fishing boat paused in the waves, waves like aluminum foil, across from the snowcaps too high to melt, and across from the peaks singing Climb us, climb us! Grab a grappling hook, across from the boat and the sushi it harvests: salmon rolls and dynamite rolls and dragons,...
Imperfection & Other Promises
My dad woke up pale and shaky on the hospital bed and asked me whether the dreams are even his anymore or if he’s just watching them. All I can do is gesture an answer; it’s still a week before they’ll know what’s wrong. His is the viscous pragmatism of a mind on diagnostics: medicated...
The Fair Kids
That’s what the teachers called them when they arrived at school every year in early October. Even though they looked worn-out in their faded, frayed clothes, I imagined their lives as worldly, exotic, roving from place to place, delivering three days of carnival razzle-dazzle to small towns like mine. I envied them because they never...
Night With Blue Eyes
For the last thirty-nine years, I have slept with another man. He has pale blue eyes like my husband. I don’t remember an introduction, though there must have been one to dull the danger so I wouldn’t feel those eyes on me. He is a predator. He is The Norwegian. It is 1979, and I...
Jijivisha
His physiotherapy was supposed to have started immediately, but it has been a stop-and-go process. More of a hard stop really because when your father says he is too tired to walk, the physiotherapists take him at his word and go on to the next patient. By the end of his first week in the...
Grief-Keeping
The first prayer I remember was shma ysrael Adonai elohaynu… trailing off into quiet murmurings of twitching lips, children’s hands covering their eyes as they recited the rest of the prayer. Too holy of a moment, in case God decided to appear. You cover your eyes to concentrate, the rabbi reminds us. Australian raptors carry...
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