Because my grandmother is dead but because when she lived she favored this place, I too have crossed the rutted road and come to Mohanraj Jewellers. At seven on a Sunday evening I could wire cash or purchase rubies. I could change my dollars for a packet of bills the size of a grown man’s…
Everything’s a window the professor told my class, and I thought about breaking that glass, or shutting the curtains, or better yet opening those windows and climbing out into the snowy world beyond. He said fashioning windows is the only way we can make sense of what we see, so even as I walked off…
My mother started writing essays in English, essays with wrong punctuation, wrong tenses, wrong spacing wrong spelling, with Arabic terms too, typed in English (and a French accent) when she cannot find the translation for…mina. In her e-mail she tells me she’s very “exited” about this— her American teacher loves her ideas, even in her…
Tell us a little about yourself. Just so we can get to know each other. What you do for a living, what you love to read, a little about you as a writer and, of course, what you want to get out of this course. Include a picture if you’d like. It’s very helpful. This…
Somewhere there is order, a multiverse of order. I could have sewed that rip in the lining with special strong thread, washed pillows for the refugees, cut new gardenias to replace the yellowed blouses collapsed in the vase, called someone, hoping they’d be happy to hear from me. I could have faced the hard time…
In old age, long after his retirement from the engineering faculty at Syracuse University, my father, Harry Gruenberg, began to have flashbacks about his life in Vienna before he escaped in 1939. He also had recurring nightmares about being buried alive. I realize now the dream was triggered by his discovery of the details of…
It was too late when I was called in, but it was probably always too late, which is to say there was really never any hope. People didn’t want to believe that—even some of the people who were closest to Beth, maybe them most of all. They would ask me for a long time after…
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth all the years of sorrow that are to come. —Jack Gilbert, “A Brief for the Defense” I’m here, listening to the sound of oars dipping and dripping while they pull across the…
I am successfully cupping fireflies with my make believe hand. I am admiring the invisible irises I forgot to plant last November. I actually see the tie-dye evolution of autumn leaves for the first time My son said after we left the hospice where my mother would be A ghost before we ever saw her…
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