I didn’t know what the word meant. So, I looked it up. Had to do with a dirge and I just couldn’t go there, been writing about the dead for so long. Suicides on the news. A celebrity chef dispatched to parts unknown and a pretty handbag lady lost it, used a red scarf. Reminded me of Jim Harrison’s line… Read more →
Here’s another wedding picture—a happy couple on a beach with a pretty mom—everyone smiling and alive. Not like my wedding where the Greek women wore black and my godfather excused them by saying, “Black is au courant.” Ever the bobcat and a fancy tom, Sam was the mysterious man wearing leather pants in my mother’s honeymoon pictures taken in a… Read more →
Worn wooden bench seats warmed by summer afternoon heat. Platform with scuffed yellow safety lines. Small shade from the platform roof forming a dark rectangle parallel to the mountains of the Cinque Terre on one side, the Mediterranean Sea on the other. The long wait. Train tracks, two, each north-south. Each entering or exiting a tunnel. Fences separate railway travelers… Read more →
Church bells ring, their metallic tone resonating through Corniglia, Italy. Thrushes form a chorus soon accompanied by unseen warblers. A car on the winding narrow road below slows, changes gears, accelerates up the incline. A roosters crows. One crow, two caws. Seagulls screech. The Hotel Cecio cleaves and clutches its high perch in the rocky terrain. The morning wind increases,… Read more →
The water is always 72 degrees. We arrive in our bathing suits, ready to cleanse the sweat and dirt off our bodies. The only way to handle the cold shock is to take a flying leap from the edge and hope that the unavoidable gasp of surprise doesn’t flood our noses and throats with water. I jump – and feel… Read more →
Rebecca The eve of your fifty-fifth birthday. How can I let another day pass without writing about you—you, my best friend for forty-two years? I owe you a chapter. A whole book! Yet writing seems ridiculously unattainable these days. Nothing profound or melodic ekes or leaks from my pen. I write only lists. On waking and sleeping and swimming, I… Read more →
Eventually, we all leave our bodies behind. The first time that this occurred to me, I was, I think, nine years old, and my parents and I had flown to Albuquerque, New Mexico to meet with my podiatrist and discuss the prospect of another surgery. I’d had five already, but after each, the bones in my left foot had begun… Read more →
I recommend the 2002 anthology of essays on Hybrid Maternity ed. by Prudence DeWitt and Angela Burney for its attention to syntactical fidelity and matrimonial pathology. Traditionally men transformed prior to sexual encounters with women. Zeus was notorious, for instance, for turning himself into a variety of animals. When he encounters Leda, he turns himself into the swan. It was far more… Read more →