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Travel
Fiction
Shoeless
The gal looked young in the body and old in the face standing alongside I-80 with a flowered suitcase held over her head to block the sun. Stop! Darrell said when we drove by her, but Jake didn’t take his foot off the gas. She’s not such a looker, gentle Glenn whispered. He was by me in the back seat. They all look the same when they’re talking to your johnson, Darrell told him. He rolled his window down and hung his head out to stare at her disappearing shape.
June 2010
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Troubled Youth
A brief, wet spring gave way to a murderously hot summer. The days were as long as medieval dragons and even harder to kill. It was so hot the squirrels took off their jackets, dredged their slender bodies in cornmeal, and arranged themselves with pearl onions in buttered pans.
June 2010
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Submit To Mother India
“Submit to Mother India,” a veteran traveler advised me before I left New York, and I intended to take her advice to heart. I steeled myself for nothing to go according to plan. I was prepared to get gruesomely ill at some point. I was prepared to let India have its way with me. “You can’t prepare yourself for India,” my well-traveled friend had also said.
April 2010
Poetry
Turning Fifty
It was a beautiful day, rainy-gray, foggy, dismal, perfect. / I was so happy because there was nothing to do / and nowhere to go and no one to meet, and never / in my life had I felt so empty and so full.
March 2010Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Burning
A human body on fire on a quiet street in a safe European city is a scene your mind is remarkably unequipped to comprehend. You see it first through the clear back panel of the bus-stop shelter as you get off the bus: Just a pile of something burning. Much bigger than a campfire. Perhaps a bonfire to keep the homeless warm.
March 2010
Readers Write
The Middle Of Nowhere
Scuba diving, a Mickey Mouse watch, half a loaf of warm bread
September 2009
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
By Song, Not Album
My dad flew to Paris to rescue me, armed with music and marijuana. I was in France to study the language as part of my college major. Before that I’d spent a few months at a Buddhist monastery in India, where I’d experienced for the first time since childhood what it was like to be happy every day, to enjoy waking up each morning.
August 2009
Poetry
Manifesto
In April I believe only in lilac, dogwood, and wisteria — such suddenness and color, indecency and mess, / always opening and opening, and fading, and falling away.
August 2009Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Archipelagoes
I am on a tiny island in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland with a full-grown ram between my legs — not the way I usually spend a summer Saturday. This began as a simple errand, to fetch a fleece for dyeing from John Finlay, a crofter and neighbor of my hosts.
July 2009
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