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Body and Mind
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Fire All Around
Even though we all breathed the smoke from the destruction of the town of Paradise in 2018 — breathed in their burning cars, homes, animals, and bodies — it was still happening “over there” to “other people.”
January 2021
Readers Write
Distance
A trip to the Antarctic, a 500-mile pilgrimage, a two-hour bus ride
January 2021
Readers Write
Holidays
Chinese New Year in Philadelphia, Thanksgiving in Mexico, Passover in prison
December 2020
Poetry
The Smaller House
While building the larger house, he lived a very simple life / in the smaller house he’d built before, the house without / water or power, the 12 x 20 foot house with three windows
November 2020Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Touchless
When both of us were fourteen days clear of getting over COVID, I left our New York apartment for the first time in a long while and quickly became alarmed. No one was on the street. This was in April, when tourists normally descend on Manhattan in flocks, even in our off-avenue neighborhood. But this year a tumbleweed would not have been out of place.
November 2020
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
How I Got To First Base
Earlier that same afternoon All-Star slugger Dave “The Cobra” Parker had revealed to me the secret of hitting: “Hit the fucker hard, and hope it goes far.” I keep this revelation enshrined in the same chamber of my heart where my rabbinical ancestors kept their favorite Scriptures.
November 2020
The Dog-Eared Page
If I Were God
If I were God, I would make a world just like this one, where everyone comes raw and naked and dependent into it; where everyone enters bloody between the legs or through the cut belly of a woman; where nothing is for certain and there is so much to learn.
November 2020
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
A Very Brutal Game
A man with the right scruffed-up beard and breadth of chest swaggered into the S and M dungeon that was my place of business, and twenty minutes and one grand later had my chin — still soft with the downy fluff of teen-girl skin — held steady in one paw while the other one flew at my face so hard and fast that I ceased to exist as the same collection of matter I had been the previous instant.
November 2020
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Sitting On My Mother
The scar in the turf in front of her headstone has long since healed. Her death date was blank at her funeral, reflecting our disbelief. It now reads, Sept. 11, 2010. Beside that is another blank for my father.
October 2020
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