We went to see The Book of Mormon (the musical).I was working on my own musical, The Book of Mermen“Merman? As in Ethel Merman?” No, I said, The Bookof Mermen, those quizzical mythical beasts halffish half man. Though I could see where Ethel Mermanwould make sense as a musical—an excruciating musicalcovering the later years, the…
Spring rolls in hard—swift, brash, heedless.Box elder saplings, blackberry and burdockbreak ground any place we leave alone. A dozen dark purple tulips sprang upby the front steps. Did we plant them?Another gesture I can’t remember— what I conceived, things I once saidwith such conviction. How I got from thereto here. I am not the person…
The rear view camerais why they hate us. ActivePark Assist, so you can havea car, not learn to parallelpark. Also Las Vegas, the decadentwest. All You Can Eat is whythey hate us, our fat ass fallingoff the edges of our chair.Our sturdy-ass chairs is whythey hate us, chairs that we sit into eat all we…
after Ozu (1936) It’s 1924 in rural Japan.A widow who’s spent her life workingin a silk factory finally decides to sacrifice everythingfor the sake of her only son’sone wish: to study in Tokyo. “Be a great man,” she tells him.He’s all she has. Twelve years later, she travelsto the capital. She hasn’t seen himsince the…
unfolds over the piano played by my son’s teacher as he watches at her side. Builds slowly, with stories of farmland, splintered barns, pumpkin patches rolling toward bay, toward ocean. Of yellow mustard fields, of fishing nets, of rivers gone dry. Of cemeteries where my mother and I must linger nearby, blistering beyond the fence. Of marble halls on the fifth floor,…
about rugs and the fluid acres weft from silk worms and sea grass, a deep plushto muzzle the floors, the daze of medallions, how stains darken with time,rugs and how we cross them, leave the slight crushmarks of our feet talk about closets, doors and how the air stills when you shut them, sawdusteddrawers and drawer-pulls and knobs like…
At twenty-five and with little direction in my life, I decided to volunteer in a soup kitchen. Several years after graduating college, things had fallen into a quarter-life stability: I was living in Boston, working as an administrative assistant at a nonprofit, making enough money to cover expenses and go out to dinner and drinking…
I slept under highways. Railroad blankets.Pale blue sections of tarp. Boathouses.Scaffold of downtown apartments. Blackclouds above me, the shadows of mountainslike mountains of darkness themselves.In Paris I slept in the Rodin garden. The fountainturned off. The pigeons disappeared to theirquiet corners in bushes. I stayed up most nights,afraid to sleep, listening closely for sounds.There was…
One friend decided to forego sugar for a month. Another the word wept.A third quit therapy in favor of praising the aubergine tinge in the clouds that served as backdrop to the tree limbs falling through his mother’s yard.Sometimes I want to give up living by lists and information, yet I still want to tell…
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