Recently, returned with a small Macy’s bag my mother accosts me in the kitchen, removing her wig. She spills the bag’s contents— eyebrow pencils: blonde, brunette, black. “I just didn’t know where to begin?” she laughs.…
The dog we took in for a night returns, scampers across town from the abandoned house where we found her, left food, water. Daily we drive her back, but in morning she’s cowering at our…
I think there are two types of people: those whose central narratives are interior, and those whose are exterior; those whose daily triumphs and despairs stem from thought or emotion, and those who glean meaning from…
One of many reasons my freshman literature students hate poetry is that “it has too many meanings,” can be “whatever you want it to be.” Kids these days like absolution, definition—an answer to life’s persistence that…
We all dine on this rhetoric from time to time: If I could be somewhere—anywhere—else, everything would be okay. I sit down to a meal of it five times a day. I grow fat from it.…
Rare days, I feel like an adult. Take last Friday: I got up at 8 a.m., went to the gym, walked the dog, paid the rent on time, unloaded the dishwasher with NPR’s Morning Edition cooing…
It’s Memorial Day and I, like millions of other American goons, wake up with a bleeding hangover. The afternoon is spent adjusting and readjusting myself on the sofa to accommodate variable nausea and the battle-ax digging…