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...
Carry Me
There’s a new curve to my hip that wasn’t there before. My stomach is softer than it used to be, my breasts a little bigger. My arms and shoulders are less defined. What once was ridge is gentler slope. I stand in the mirror, posture and pose, hold flesh in my hand, fill it. I...
My Father Becomes a Bird
Sitting at the edge of his hospice bed, eyes closed, Dad focuses on his breath. Late-stage lung cancer has made each one hard earned. Each one, only the slightest rise and fall of the clean T-shirt his nurse put on him this morning. I stand behind him, my thumbs massaging—so lightly now—the tendons of his...
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...
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...
In The Neuro Unit
Old men lie pale and shrunken, their blood pressure cuffs wheezing, their heart monitors beeping, their oxygen levels flashing bright green numbers on small computer screens as their brains sigh and shudder with dreams of summer slumber, of supple thighs and willing bodies, of late-night assignations and the creaking back seats of cars. They inhale,...
Why I Bought an Inflatable Hot Tub from Walmart on Black Friday During a Pandemic
Because my mother was tired of peeing her pants at Super Value Grocery Store. Because someone told her about an amazing same-day surgery that would fix everything. Because it was a miracle cure! Because the docs said they’d hoist her sorry leaky bladder up onto a miracle mini mesh “hammock.” Because they promised it...
At Sea
He holds the rock in his hand, size of a grapefruit, color of an orange if the orange had been scuffed with sand. Rough and bumpy, surface flaking with dried mud, it glitters in the sun, and I think how when I was a boy I might’ve been scared, the idea of my dad...
Mothers’ Top Dresser Drawers
To rummage there was to be let in on a secret. You whispered. You tiptoed. Among the satin, lace, and letters of my mother’s was a string of pearls I let trickle across my palm. It had clung to the collarbone of her grandmother, my great-grandmother, Anna B, the one who claimed to be born...
My Dead
When my grandmother died decades ago, she left her breasts to me. It started slowly, almost imperceptibly. My breasts began to swell in size and volume as if they had infants to feed. But it’s been decades since I’ve had babies to nurse, and still they grew—large, pillowy, and pendulous. I’d rested my head on...
The Dresser
“Look what he’s done.” My grandmother—Greggie—tried to sound annoyed, but her tone came across as affectionate because Papa hadn’t actually done anything wrong. We stood in their bright, airy bedroom discussing the maple furniture with its black and gold accents—I liked the intricate stenciled hearts. Greggie brushed her arthritic fingers over the corner of Papa’s...
The Voice of Things
My wife and I moved a short while back from our crowded and lair-like house outside Boston to an abruptly more open and airy place in Amherst. Over a month in, I’m still gaping at new space and different light. The move came after thirty years in the house that most of our lives had...
The Old Phrases
Billie Holiday’s 1944 recording of “I’ll Be Seeing You” was the final transmission sent by NASA to the Opportunity rover on Mars when its mission ended on February 13, 2019. At the Center My father’s friend Harry, a man whose memory has perished before him, says, Are you from the neighborhood? Are you here to take me home?...
What Joy Looks Like
Your grandfather on your grandmother’s lap at Christmas, wearing polyester and mismatched plaids, his colostomy bag under his shirt crinkling against her body, and he’s weeping like you’ve never seen, much harder than an hour earlier when he appeared in the dining room doorway and said, “I’m sorry I yelled at you,” and burst into...
Last Words
The dictionary, red and tattered, sits in a cardboard box in my garage along with a telephone, its only button programmed to speed-dial my mobile number. Both items once belonged to my mother. For a time, the dictionary and its 1,550 pages of definitions comforted her. A woman of words, my mother wrote the food...
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