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Aging
Poetry
Birdhouse
Do you have a twenty-foot extension ladder? / Good. / Let’s get it out of the garage. / I want to put this birdhouse up on one of the evergreens / that stands off your back deck.
October 2016Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
A Good Daughter
But what daughter wouldn’t be unnerved by such foreshadowings of the time when her mother won’t be able to take care of herself; when she will have to be cooked for, spoon-fed, helped out of bed, cleaned in the most private of ways? You want your mother to be there to take care of you, to wipe away a smudge with her spit, to make you dinner, to catch you before you fall.
October 2016
Fiction
Whatever Day It Is
My tester asks me to take a seat in the waiting room while she reviews my score. She wants to see if I have missed anything. I want to tell her I missed my fifties, skipped that whole section of my life, lived anesthetized for a decade, ten years on autopilot — years you think will continue to replicate themselves, dull and identical, until you die. Then the serious aging starts, and you know your fifties as gold poorly spent.
October 2016Poetry
Selected Poems
— from “For This” | It is for this / we have been torn / and mended / and torn again.
January 2016Poetry
Taking My Old Dog Out To Pee Before Bed
Dew is already deep in the overgrown grass, / the air damp with a salty tang. / Zeke’s hips are too ground down / to lift a leg, so he just stands there.
December 2015Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Here Comes Your (Middle-Aged) Man
The Pixies — whose members looked minuscule on stage, even through my new prescription glasses — were a pioneering alternative-rock outfit from the late 1980s and early 1990s. My younger self had adored them. Much to his dissatisfaction, he never got the chance to see the band play live before they broke up in 1993. Now they were on a reunion tour — and so, it seemed, were my former self and I.
September 2015The Dog-Eared Page
The Disposable Rocket
The number of men who do lasting damage to their young bodies is striking; war and car accidents aside, secondary-school sports, with the approval of parents and the encouragement of brutish coaches, take a fearful toll of skulls and knees.
September 2015Poetry
Improvement
The optometrist says my eyes / are getting better each year. / Soon he’ll have to lower my prescription. / What’s next? The light step I had at six?
August 2015Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Enigma
Each year on April 25 my mother calls to remind me that it’s the anniversary of my father’s death, so I should take a moment to think about him.
May 2015
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