We were given these instruments after your birth: syringe, Tegaderm, Heparin flush. This morning, I found them behind the file cabinet. Dare I throw them out? I am a superstitious girl. When I stood in the parted door and gave you up for the scan, anesthetized, dye-injected, your one-year-old body sang its sweet, green galaxy…
Even as a child I could induce it at will. I’d go to where the big rocks stayed cold in the woods all summer, and tea mind would come to me like water over stones, pool to pool, and in that way I taught myself to think. Green teas are my favorites, especially the basket-fired…
One of the few friends I have left asks the question. As a poet, you would expect him not only to ask but to answer. “How do we know the agenda of love?” he asks and elaborates, “If you expose the heart, it can split wide open.” “So why do we love?” I ask him….
Earlier in her literary career, Mary Gordon was fond of quoting Flannery O’Connor, who’d once said that writers learned everything they needed to know before the age of eight. What does Gordon — the celebrated, bestselling author of four novels, three collections, and a memoir — believe she had learned? “I think I learned the…
At the end of the dark at the end of the hall, my older sister stood by the mirror, casting for her real face in a square of light. I was eight. Had she known that I was still awake, pillow doubled under to raise my head, she’d have screamed and slammed the bathroom door,…
I meet my father in a restaurant. He knows why I have asked to meet him, but he swaggers in anyway. It’s a place near his office, and he hands out hellos all around as he makes his way over to my table. “My daughter,” he explains to the men who have begun to grin,…
Ann Beattie, My Life, Starring Dara Falcon, a novel: Beattie’s sixth novel is narrated, with soaring irony and comic verve, by Jean Warner, a young bride in New England whose life and marriage are spun helter-skelter by the arrival of Dara Falcon, a brilliant, pathological liar. (Knopf)
It wasn’t lewd or revealing of anything round except my shoulders which Mother forever urged back with military brio, yellow—never my best color— a square of magenta for the bust, bought in the Village at mod, expensive Paraphernalia (what Grandpa called his bait and tackle; his paraphernalia). Did you know that store? Glossy white go-go…
I n the future, everyone will be someone else. At her school, the future had been discussed as if it were a definite sort of business, with tangible boundaries like an island nation. It was a place you could rocket to or grope towards in a state of anticipation. But if thinking about your actual…
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