Over the past decade, my taste in literature—or at least my engagement with it—has shifted dramatically. I spend most of my “reading time” reciting charming and insufferable tales to my children. Curious George, for instance, is both the account of an irascible chimp unleashed in the big city and the chilling tale of interspecies abduction….
The night before my husband and I agreed to get married, we fought. It was a stupid and terrible argument. I’d planned a whole proposal for the next day: rented a rowboat, bought a bottle of champagne, measured his finger while he slept and had a wooden ring made. When he confessed, after a few…
In the Boston of inherited wealth, the five fetching Rotch daughters were raised in a Commonwealth Avenue mansion in the same Back Bay neighborhood as the Crosby and Bigelow families. The eldest daughter, Josephine, was engaged to marry Albert Bigelow the day after Bert’s graduation from Harvard. But when Josie and her mother sailed to…
Because loss is the back of the photographwe never look at, I write your deathbedscenario on the palm of my handwhile your husband prays and your motherbrings dessert to the funeral. So sensitive,I hear you say at the edge of heaven, the endof history, so strange how we’re herefor only an eyeflash. You stumblewith your…
Like the deer who kept returningto our office because for monthsthe receptionist left salt licksin the underbrush. How would it knowthe receptionist died sleddingwith her children in a late spring snow? Sometimes painbecomes the deer—it keeps showing upthough I have nothing to give it,so I watch it from my office windowuntil it turns, tilts its head at…
Now your child can visit steamy jungles, grassy plains,and the dark depths of the oceans. To meet and learnsurprising facts about the magnificent animals thatlive there!—Zoobooks Commercial Today, I’ve been lying 40 minutes in the grass with a book, at the quad,in between paths both running together and nowhere, purposefully expeditious, of the University I…
has gone mad about you and your recent remarkson black life. My father suggests cremationif I die before him because it’s cheaper.I want to be cremated. I’ve wept over a bad embalming job.Might I ask, why aren’t you online talking about my eyes?Or where you go when you want to write about hunger?Remember Denzel Washington…
We were sitting shoulder to shoulder looking at the firesin the canyon and I said something about distance, desire moving from archive to digital, I was thinking of startingsomething, despite time zones or children, husbands or wives. The clouds parted an instant, I thought I sawthe shadow of cumulus cross your face but it was…
What happens to good girls?They get presents.What happens to bad girls?They get tied up & locked in the closet. A stiletto was first a pen,Then a dagger,Now a heel.Caravaggio’s Medusa was painted on a shield.The painting itself is an object of warfare.I wear purple marks from you on myEyes & hips. Medusa’s head is full…
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