I’ve been noticing rocks everywhere I go—small or large, boulders or pebbles. My friend Thor began rock tumbling as a hobby while bored during the pandemic. He and his wife, Sara, moved temporarily into a small duplex while their dream house was being built on a bluff overlooking the Salish Sea, and polishing these rocks…
There is nothing particularly remarkable about a man my age having two artificial knees, except that everything about it is rather remarkable. Let’s start with the idea that a surgeon can take an electric saw, excavate the knee joint and portions of the adjacent femur and tibia, swap in a man-made hinge, re-wrap the existing…
When I left the house this morning, there was a ruckus in the grass, a rustling buzz, something digging under leaves. As I got closer and the buzzing intensified, I saw a cicada, pinned by a yellow and black, hard-shelled wasp. The cicada fought and shuddered and stilled. Then tried again to right itself. The…
I. I’m born at the end of the world. That is, geographically, in a small harbor town in southern California where the continent climaxes in a blaze of coastline, beyond it lying only the mirage-like remains of anarchipelago, the great gray curvature of the planet, and the sun whereit sets. My grandmother lives there too…
We had a garage sale yesterday to let some stuff go. It was like an Independence Day sale, or that’s what we called it, cuz my brothers said people buy more things for holidays. I put out my metal roller skates and old blue pogo stick and Big Wheel. It felt sad to give up…
We watch them watch us, a family of four, a tribe “in the world” but not “of it.” Our clothes are shirts-tucked-in-to-the-real-waistline and modest-the-dress and the hat-cannot-be-backwards. We shuffle and do not know how to stand when our parents ask for the grocery manager. Can you turn off the music while we shop? At the checkout counter,…
When I was seven years old, my parents noticed I had perfect pitch and could play almost anything by ear, so they started me on piano lessons. But I had trouble with my fingers: they were somehow never independent and my struggles to keep from bending two at a time made my wrists tighten. I…
“Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation …” —Gravesite of President John F. Kennedy (1917–1963), Arlington National Cemetery (reinterment 1967), Quoting JFK’s Inaugural Address (1961) “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou heareth the sound thereof,…
1. Lavabo y Espejo, by Antonio López García, is a painting of a bathroom sink and mirror. The sink, fused to the wall, floats. Its shadow grows west. The mirror above waits, empty, reflecting no person, only the square tiles of the opposite wall. On a transparent shelf between sink and mirror sit tools meant for…
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