Browse Topics

Betrayals

“Mask her!”, “No nemina!”, “He’s beating her up again”

Denial

How old is the habit of denial? We keep secrets from ourselves that all along we know. The public was told that old Dresden was bombed to destroy strategic railway lines. There were no railway lines in that part of the city. But it would be years before that story came to the surface.

Anatomy Of A Lie

I can’t tell you this, but my mother has a dot on her lung. It’s a small dot, on the left lung. If her lung were a map of Texas, the dot would be roughly the size of the city of El Paso, which is large enough to be written in boldface type by Rand McNally.

The Forgotten Children

When I pushed away the cot and lifted the trapdoor, his eyes glinted for a moment like an animal’s in the beam of Mother’s flashlight. Biscuit crumbs clung to his mouth, and around his shoulders was the old blanket he’d secreted away. I reached down to help him up, but he shrank from me, his eyes filled with hatred.

Insomnia

The Night You Saved The World

Homeless, But Not Crazy

Shortly after 1 a.m. recently, on-call in the psychiatric emergency room of a Boston hospital, I was asked to evaluate a homeless man, and in the process I confronted the limits of my professional empathy.

Lost Causes

A good girl, a neglected child, a disappointed daughter

Selected Poems

Tonight the trees bend over like broken / old women picking up their husbands’ / empty whiskey bottles.

— from “Drunk Again, I Stumble Home On Euclid And Cut Across Thornden Park Baseball Field”

Last Year’s Poverty Was Not Enough

The day hadn’t begun well, but it was just another day in a long line of mean, anxious hours. Time mashed in on her like a couple of hands folded hard in prayer.