start with a murder
of crows, they who first saw me at the retreat: week in ohio, more than a little death at my heels. five or six of them, the crows, perched and rattling a dead-top tree, cackled me down a good morning (returned). a good morning (returned) is what I am seeking; that elusive memory of sunup...
Mystery House
A door opens onto a wall. A window is trapped behind another. I visit the mystery house with my college boyfriend for an anniversary, but really, I am trying to uncover how I became a girl who accepts being torn down and rebuilt like this house. I am looking to solve the riddle where one...
A Barber is Born
Once upon a time, a young man with large ears and poor eyesight traveled from farm to city to pursue his trade. As his quick fingers spooled wet hair and snipped to the finest inch, a barber pole pulsed in the distance, spiraling him towards a spit-groomed future he was close enough to chase. The...
Let There Be More Spices
1 In the beginning there was only absence. Of flavor. 2 The table of my youth was a darkness of bland, the burden of my mother’s type I diabetes baked into every surface. So as I stared at the jar of lard my new mother-in-law kept on the stove I felt myself hovering over the...
Fifteen Facts About Zebras
My granddaughter has a toy I’ve come to hate. It’s one of those touch-activated gizmos with dozens of animal sounds: tap a picture of a cow and it moos, pat a horse and it whinnies. But touch a zebra and it sounds like a squeaky pump with hiccups. That sound was so strange I asked...
My Mother Wants to Talk
I’m on the sidewalk in front of my next-door neighbor’s house, just returning from my morning dog walk, when my mother calls. I tell her I’m just getting home, but I can talk for five to 10 minutes. Mom says, I want to talk for more than five to 10 minutes. I say, Talk. She...
When I Was Someone Else
The white ceiling looks like heaven, I say to the nurse who hands me a paper cup of water and asks me again, maybe for the third time, to rate my pain on a scale of one to ten. Three, I say, which is true. For once the hurt is minimal. Nine is the number...
When the Scheduler Calls and Refers to My Upcoming Procedure as an “Emergency Colonoscopy”
The images that flash in my mind are not my grandfather’s last breaths, his frail wrinkled body giving up after cancer ate away his insides. Not my mother lying in a hospital bed after the surgery to remove nine inches of her diseased intestines. Not choosing the cheapest wooden casket and a burial plot near...
Kinship: One Week in LA
“Ki” to signify a being of the living Earth. Not “he” or “she,” but “ki.” So that when we speak of Sugar Maple, we say, “Oh that beautiful tree, ki is giving us sap again this spring.” And we’ll need a plural pronoun, too, for those Earth beings. Let’s make that new pronoun “kin.” ...
How Beautiful That Unruly Tongue Unfurls
Para tod@s that still spit back Caló, trilongo, dialect, jargon, pachuco slang, pachuco caló, “code-switching” (as some academics like to call it), or simplemente el lenguaje que nace del barrio is my favorite way to commune with those I choose to commune with. To make myself legible and illegible, and knowing that I have this...
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 –...
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