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Family and Relationships
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Love and Other Pandemics
The thing about the apocalypse is that nobody said it would be so beautiful. Spring is letting down her hair. The air is warm, sweet, and clear. Moss drapes over a storm drain, parting for the rush of early-morning runoff. A heavy quiet has descended since we took to our homes, save for the shrieking hawks circling the shuttered strip-mall parking lot next door to my mother’s house outside of Philadelphia.
November 2024
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Telephone Mode
I find talking on the phone to be one of the purest forms of communication. You are receiving the person’s voice, their tone, their laughter, without the distraction of their clothing, their hairdo, their body. I don’t care what someone looks like. I want to hear them sigh with exhaustion or cackle with delight. I want to hear tiny details of the environment from which they speak: birdsong, barking dogs, the beep of a microwave.
November 2024
Poetry
Driving Upstate with My Father
Driving upstate with my father / at the end of a bad year. Trees begin / to outnumber houses. Rain turns to snow / as fields hang like paintings. / Dad fills his lip with chew, talks.
November 2024
Fiction
Bone Frag
There are countless theories about the origins of the pebble storms. The one that makes the most sense to me is something about melting ice caps and ocean acidification and dying coral reefs.
October 2024
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Next Peak
The mountain in winter enables the kind of sleep that restores, heals, allows brains to solve problems. The days have more than enough darkness to crawl inside.
October 2024
Poetry
The Dream
In the small, trembling room of my longing, A., / Last night—summer wearing the walls, autumn / Spread in orange colors on the floor, upon which / We lay, two quiet pianos, soul music pouring / Over the hidden grass—we touched, my face to the mirror of yours.
September 2024Fiction
still lives
The omen comes in the ruin of a robin’s egg on the sidewalk: fractured blue splattered with the pink makings of a flightless thing. A plum membrane of skin stretched over eyes like bruises. I make the mistake of looking back at this small disaster, and then the calamity of it fingers the threads of my morning.
September 2024
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
And These Too Are Defensive Wounds
I’d thought the transcripts would help me write a letter to the parole board, but when I opened them, I saw a section of my own testimony at Maynard’s trial, and that was that. My head filled with hissing static; my heart raced.
September 2024
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