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Payday

It’s summer, and I’m taking two women from a foundation that helps fund my work to see where the money is being spent, and if the money is being turned into productive, life-sustaining gardens.

The Laundromat

Stolen clothes, a miniature copy of The Night before Christmas, a red halter top

Sunbeams

Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.

Agnes Repplier

Connecting A Few Dots

Without context, a piece of information is just a dot. It floats in your brain with a lot of other dots and doesn’t mean a damn thing. Knowledge is information in context — connecting the dots; making your own map.

For Lulu, With Love

She is pushed in through the door of the rural Mississippi clinic where I work. Behind her is movement, the rise and fall of slurred voices. Then a cluster of people crowd in behind her. But Lulu stands where she was pushed. She looks at me. I look at her, but not for long.

October 1997

Let’s respect the heroes who live far from public sight: behind a battered desk in a legal-aid office; on a meditation cushion; in the kitchen at three in the morning, rocking a child who can’t sleep.

Starting Kevin

The idea of a baby sucking on her breast, the way her boyfriend back in Durant had liked to do, disgusted Vanessa, but she said she would try it. Kevin didn’t seem interested — just mouthed at her soft flesh and fell asleep — although he latched on quickly to the firm bottle nipple the maternity-ward nurses offered.

One True Life

Walking to the neighborhood store, / my small, beautiful dog / straining at his red leash, and I / in my big winter jacket / against an April freeze and this / light battering of rain — / a young man approaches us, can / of beer and a Lotto / ticket in his hand.

Eric, Recovering Wino

The jail, the acid, being alone — it all starts to get to me. I feel ashamed, no good. I shit in the toilet; I fish out the turd; I take my spoon and eat a piece of the turd. I drink a spoonful of urine. I break the windowpanes with my elbows, cutting myself in the process. I try to cut off the fingers of my left hand, but succeed only in producing a deep gash across them. The blood floods out in big bright red drops. The air fills with the smell of my blood. I write my name on the wall with it. Thick gobs cling to my gray cell wall. I’m trying to think of a way to cut myself deeper when the guards come and haul me to the hospital.

Hand-Me-Downs

Duck, Duck, Goose; Central Park; manic depression