We were driving back from a weekend away at a friend’s house in Normandy when I thought I saw my father—his pebbly gray ashes indisputably scattered and sunk in the icy Atlantic ten long winters before—now alive and well, a passenger in a neighboring coupe. “Dad,” I whispered in astonishment, like a little extra exhalation…
My armpits smell like Campbell’s soup and my hair feels like the welcome mat beneath the sign to wipe your feet between the showroom and the shop. Who’s the new guy sweeping up? Six bucks an hour, off the books. Outside the showroom and the shop, he sleeps in cabs of junkyard trucks, eats at…
So you think I couldn’t have been the life of your miserable party. You think because I graded 9th-grade quizzes into the night I was probably fit for just that. You think I didn’t finish my novel because I feared it might not sell. You assume because my immigrant parents refused to teach me their…
First, some disclaimers: I know what you’re thinking. Where does Sasha Porter, otherwise known as the Family Pariah, get off thinking she can pull it together long enough to tell you a story? That it should be my sister, Zora the Great, telling this story. Zora, the writer; Zora, Daddy’s favorite. Yes, that Zora. But,…
Why are you so hard on the suicide like self-love is his only problem not getting the position of his body right in front of the train? Full sun. The mirror in the hotel actually a television set, no one here to make a commentary to, last night, you sat next to the brother in…
I meet Margaret Mead that year— “that old lady, what a pain in the ass she is!”— or so her helper says, a dreadlocked Dominican from Yonkers; but outside her suite at the Museum of Natural History in the corner turret high above 77th & Columbus after she’s pottered off I take photos of the…
We were sitting in the restaurant window when I heard myself saying Seamus is here– though there was no greeting, and our view was blocked by a brewery lorry pulled up on the kerb. I’d no sight of him, but it was nothing spooky either. What I had seen under the lorry were two feet…
They laughed, at first, at his shrieks seeing the face his father wore: a horse head mask unearthed from the closet where he kept his army uniform, the white rubber face with real hair for a mane under which his father’s shoulders bulged. His father’s large hands tossed the boy into the air then onto…
Of our first album critics remember only the flaws. Major domo/manager/producer, I recorded the band live from Boston’s Park St. Station— over a pay phone to my parents’ house in Quincy. Rush-hour subway screech tilting everything apocalyptic, amid the operator’s recurrent ten cents for three more minutes, please. “I had nothing to lose,” Molloy said,…
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