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Siblings
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
Photography
To the Bone
“To the Bone” is an ongoing photography project documenting daily life and work on a small family farm in the Hudson Valley. Emily, a single mother, manages their small farm with the help of her children. My intention is to explore the strength, dignity and love that keeps them deeply connected as a family, to each other and to their unique way of life on the farm.
July 2024
Fiction
A Knife at the Throat
We had never heard of a kid who had cancer. We knew of teenagers who’d been killed in farming accidents and at least a few who had been maimed riding ATVs with no helmets, their skulls coming into contact with country roads. But not cancer. It seemed like something that happened to aunts and uncles. Combined with the lack of rain and the impending foreclosure, 1983 was beginning to feel apocalyptic.
July 2024
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Surrogates
Twin had lived inside a concrete kennel for four of her five years. Wylie, who also lived inside a concrete box, had gone to prison as a teen. He’d cared for Twin since she was a puppy, which meant he had likely opened her kennel to feed her and let her out thousands of times.
April 2024
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Such Gifts
He tells me how Mom’s rabbi tried to convince him that life has a purpose, but my brother wasn’t having it. Existence is a tapestry of chaos, he writes, that we impose meaning on to give our lives purpose.
February 2024
Poetry
The Only Ones
Poems About Parents
I failed at wisdom, nurture, / nature, separation, and calm. / I excelled at role model, if what / you wanted was wretched.
— from “Old Mom,” by Jessica Barksdale
What my father didn’t know when he drove / ten-year-old me in the bed of his pickup truck / to gun shows & shooting ranges, initiating me / into the art of the hunt, was that he was actually / teaching me how to write poems
— from “Portrait Of The Poet As A Child,” by Elizabeth Knapp
In my memories my godfather towers / over me, his deep baritone thundering / above us as we sing hymns during Sunday / service.
— from “Small,” by Courtney LeBlanc
My brother calls to say he’ll meet us / for lunch in a few hours, not to wait for him / if he’s late. He’s got to pick up Mom. / And though the crematorium / is near our hotel, he’ll take her ashes home / first.
— from “Waiting In Cars,” by Jackleen Holton
August 2023Poetry
Ode To My Brother’s Face Tattoos
At twenty you’ve managed to erase / our dad’s face from your own, / blacked out his sharp cheekbones / with roses, marked each eyelid / with an upside-down cross to distract / from his glossy brown irises.
March 2023
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