From “Thank You for Hearing Me.” Sinéad O’Connor (1966-2023) It must have been springtime 1988. I was 27 and living in ...
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A Question for Mathew Brady
Brady maybe knew that the power of his eye Was not that he saw something new— Not that he discovered a secret passageway into seeing Like, say, ...
My Familiars
My familiars — cat, fox, owl — sat around a dining room table, drinking whiskey and lamenting my waywardness. The cat especially was a sloppy ...
Emptying the Cabinet of Angst
A few weeks ago, I decided it was time to tackle the under-the-basement-stairs cabinet, which had been filled for the last decade with all the ...
The Consultant
My appointment with the consultant was his first of the day, 8am, in the third floor conference room, the one with the overactive thermostat that ...
Observation from the deck
As I sit on our backyard deck, I hear a rhythmic flopping noise coming from the church road that runs parallel to our property. There—a scruffy ...
This Hand I Hold
I am fixated on the memory of his hands. I can picture him lighting his pipe. The pipe in his left hand, the Zippo lighter in his right. The ...
Sentimental Walk
“This is how Rome fell,” I say to Kirat. “How do you mean?” “Wasn’t there a siege or something? The Goths surrounded the city, which was ...
The Dying Off
It was like this. In the early days, if you had paid attention, you would have noticed the things left undone. Driving down the highway, the sign ...
Breaktown
Bennie Lou fumbled for her tape recorder when the melee broke out at the school board meeting. Raymond Canckle punched the Reverend Walter ...
Origin Stories
Leave your orange flight suit, the one you wore testing how low and fast you could fly above the trees. Leave your leather bomber jacket with ...
Tick-tock
“There are still around 16,000 nuclear weapons on the planet—most of them much more destructive than those that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki ...
13 Fragments
It was like this: I put on the dress he had bought me, the one I hated but he loved. A navy shirt dress and embroidered belt from Talbott’s. Very ...
Photograph (1974)
I am thirteen, wearing my brother’s long denim shirt with the pearly snaps over my gymnastics leotard, and my red elephant bell-bottom pants with ...
Sometimes we break glass
The first time I grieved was for comedian Freddie Prinze. It was around the time of the ‘77 blizzard and outside my suburban Ohio home, the yards ...