The Once Wife
BERLIN is still one city in the early morning hours of August 13, 1961, just before hastily installed barbed wire slices it in two. If there is no before and no after, then what remains? Me. Here. Bookending the last seat in a row of five chairs placed at the front of a funeral home....
“Tetanus, You Understand?”
September 2, 1994:Has anyone ever loved you as much as me? October 12, 1995:My possessions thrown into the arms of skeptical moving men, my three tiny dogs snatched and trundled into an apartment with white-painted walls, my mother arrived from North Carolina and sleeping on the floor inside the frame of a mattress-less bed. Fled,...
Ornithology
We’re walking to school and Claire is naming the birds. There’s a chickadee, she says. And that one is a nuthatch. I think that one could be a flicker. She’s usually right, though even when she is not, I don’t correct her. Dad, is that a pileated woodpecker? She’s holding on to the index finger of my left hand –...
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