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Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
What To Expect
Try to avoid symbolism and metaphors, and leave fate out of it, too. Fate was not preparing you for this loss when you were an eight-year-old farm girl and held that stillborn piglet for hours in the barn.
November 2019
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Seven Days In A Sea-Creature Town
Decorah sat in the impact crater of an asteroid that had struck the earth hundreds of millions of years ago. One of the extinct giant sea creatures exhumed from its crust — the shrimp-looking Pentecopterus decorahensis — had been named after the town.
November 2019
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Sleep Study
I wake at 2:34 AM and lie in bed staring at the ceiling for a couple of hours, beating myself up for having awakened way before it’s time to get up.
October 2019
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Button
The little button lying in my hand brought the violent history of the place to life. For a moment war wasn’t just pictures in textbooks. I could feel the residue of it, the half-life of violence.
October 2019
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
A Shrinking World
Let’s put aside, for the moment, the thought of mass extinction. . . . Even if that is our eventual due, life will first look and feel different. Life as we know it won’t suddenly end, but it will be crimped; in many places, it already is.
October 2019
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Unexpected Things
A notorious buffoon is elected to the highest office in the land. He lies, cheats, connives, and endangers the planet and all its inhabitants. Did anyone expect this?
September 2019
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Stolen Time
Blind luck put me on this yard where the men have decided to make good use of the empty time forced upon us by the state. Yard A is downright peaceful, nothing like the prison yards where racist convicts stab and assault people.
September 2019
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Now And Then I Look For You
Two alleys down from the bodega, where I found you that time. Under the defunct, overturned hot tub that once or twice served as your roof.
September 2019Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Cop Diary
Over the past year, more than a hundred people have worn my handcuffs. Not long ago, in a self-defense class, I wore them myself. . . . The catch of the steel teeth as the cuffs tighten is austere and final, and never so much so as when it emanates from the small of your back.
September 2019
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
First Place
Three months before his third birthday, his Italian grandfather (on his mother’s side) set him on a proper bicycle, pushed him forward, and shouted, “Spingi, spingi, spingi!” Just like that, he rode down the driveway.
August 2019
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