Transition Lenses
My mom is doing karaoke in the kitchen, holding a microphone that our neighbor ordered for her on Amazon, belting from her chest. Her hair is silver. Her shirt, a creamsicle orange polo. Her glasses are thin rimmed, the kind that turn dark in the sun. Transition lenses, they’re called. My mom is doing karaoke...
A Small, Previously Unknown, Hole in My Heart
The afternoon my husband left me, I collapsed on the floor in a fetal position, my face at the level of the birds on our stone patio. Through the sliding glass door, I watched juncos, sparrows, and chickadees alight to peck at seeds, jostle one another, then fly away. Over and over, they came and...
I Hear You Man
I don’t remember a time when men, young, elderly, or middle-aged, stranger, or familiar, didn’t randomly confide in me the most traumatic horrors of their reality. Is there something about my bespectacled face? My half-broken nose? Is it my beard? Is it too philosophic, should it be more fundamentalist? Or maybe it’s something subcutaneous, a...
Surf
Peter says, “I can’t sleep in this relentless surf.” “You’re the one who loves ritual and repetition.” “Ritual, yes. But this pounding is relentless.” We are sitting on the screened porch of our friend Fita’s beach house, Alligator Point near Tallahassee, watching the sun slide down from cirrus to cirrus in a blaze of lavender, hot...
An Abecedarian Nocturne for the NICU Moms
An angel got its wings today, the caption reads beneath a photo of a mother’s baby the size of a hand posted to the Facebook NICU parents page. Night nurse clicks around vital sign jumbo screens. The whir of my breast pump punctuates each beat as I doom scroll through pictures and pleas –...
It’s Only Fair
When the ax falls, we stand perfectly still, as is expected. We don’t close our eyes. We don’t take a step back to avoid the splatter. We stand off to the side, breathing through our mouths, tasting the stench of chicken shit and sweat. We can hear the chimes of the ice cream truck in...
Just a Joe
Alaska’s winter darkness can almost drive a person insane. That’s a commonplace, but I could tell from one visit to Anchorage, its absence of true darkness in June might do it too. I stepped out of a bookstore, a bit too cutely called “The Title Wave,” where I’d bought a book and a copy of...
The Last Time I Climbed A Mountain
There are a thousand things I can’t recall: the date, the place, the details of the trail. I was nineteen, maybe twenty. It was a strong ascent, somewhere above St. Gallen in the Alps. All the rest has gone to mist. What stays: the incandescent sunshine. How the air bit thin and clean against my...
Where the Dust Goes
It’s 8 a.m. You’ve dropped the kids at school and you’re on your way home when this crazy blur of squirrel runs onto Allen Drive. You don’t hear a thing. Instead, you feel him. A small bounce of the car, a tiny jolt, and now he’s just a bump under your wheel, his frantic squirrel...
Lamentation for Junior
A few months after my biological brother’s funeral, my father calls to say my stepbrother just got shot and killed by Milwaukee police. They say they tried to pull him over but he sped off, crashed, fled on foot with a gun in hand. You can imagine the rest. When my stepmother takes the phone,...
Jiaozi
Changsha, China, I’m fourteen months old. My life has swiveled on its axis and turned west, towards the United States, a new life and new family. However, before I leave, I get one last dinner. One last farewell. I sit in my highchair, next to my new parents. Curious eyes searching the room for something...
Return Journey
The night of the Space X Dragon launch, my father collapses at the kitchen table. A week earlier, he had his third surgery to correct the way his muscles, spasming with Parkinson’s, pulled at his spine, forced it into a parabolic function instead of a proud column. For the third time, a doctor split him...
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...
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