Nonfiction

The Dead

"It is only during times of celebration or mourning that loved ones are together," my father says. "Not like in the old country when everybody lived and worked as a village." He and his siblings have moved further apart and spoken less through the years. On the phone, they tell each other how preoccupied they…

Becoming Visible

I was nearing the middle of my life when I became a girl. Up until then I was a woman, work-possessed, abstracted, safe. I wore khaki corduroy trousers weathered down to the gauze weave and a puffy and rather grimy electric-turquoise coat, and I cut my black hair short and blow-dried it perkily aloft. I…

Evidence of Things Unseen

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. —Hebrews 11:1 1. Morphine makes me small, airborne. Like a spider. I rest in a high corner of the ceiling, look down on my body on the white hospital bed. It was just one shot, one needle through my skin….

Remembering Ray Bourque

Some mornings I try to remember: what is the name of the famous hockey defenseman for the Boston Bruins who, in the last few years of his 22-year career, played for the Colorado Avalanche and who, in his last year of play, was part of a Colorado team that won the Stanley Cup? Ray Bourque….

Fig Leaf

"Well, you have hair on your vagina. That’s a real buzzkill." This was the response my boyfriend, Brian, gave me when some time around our three-month anniversary I got up the courage to address our disappointing sex life. Later that night, when I called an old roommate to confirm that it was normal to have…

Tempo and Duration

When I was young I used to go to museums with my father in the city where he worked. At the time I didn’t know how to look at art for myself, so often instead of looking at the paintings I just looked at him. I had no idea how art developed and concluded in…

Trashing Andy Warhol

The senior poet collected things. Porcelain and carved hands, postcards, cobalt glass miniatures, World’s Fair memorabilia, contemporary art. I managed his calendar and his townhouse and his art collection, as well as the more domestic routines of buying groceries and cooking dinner five nights a week—if he wasn’t dining out. He’d made clear in the…